Well it’s been out for a while, but I’ve not seen a lot about it in the Excel community. So what do you think to the new version?
I have uninstalled it on my mechanics; it was way too much of a pain. I couldn’t open files by default in an earlier version and that was a massive problem, because I couldn’t really do any work with 2007.
Downers about 2007
Ribbons.
Ok hard to use to start off with, fair play, that’s a learning curve but I found that I really missed toolbars I could call up and float in the work space. The Toolbox toolbar for example. I tend to have fixed toolbars with really common buttons, then call up specific toolbars when I need them. I found I was forever having to change the tab to get top the tool set I wanted – I might as well use menus.
VBA.
If you’ve done anything with toolbars or menus your in trouble! Also much other code seems to be a bit hit or miss, which is hard to believe.
Interface colour.
Is it just me or does anyone else hate, hate, hate that bloody washed out blue colour MS insist on using? It was the same in 2003. In the 2007 beta blues the default and I can change that to a “Visa” grey (Vista grey is in fact black and all but unusable), More importantly the blue makes it really difficult to make out some of the tool buttons in the VBE. (I wonder if you could use the toolbars from the VBE, which are the same as ever, in the new Excel interface?)
The “Office Button”
That big round button in the top right”¦ Didn’t really win me over, the popup looks naff, it feels like a bit of a catch all where MS can stick stuff that doesn’t really go anywhere else.
The Zoom Bar
Anyone with a scroll mouse will have no need for this, not that it’s that much of a feature anyway.
The Good Things.
Charts look much nicer (although I’m lead to belie they are hard to customise).
Formatting is much improved.
Colours seem better.
so what’s your take on the new version?????
Related posts:
I feel your pain.
I wish they would’ve just given us the million rows, extra sort levels, and nicers charts and been done with it. If you’ve spent a decade customizing your toolbar and learning all the shortcuts, the ribbon is a disaster. Using the mouse will make me faster and more productive? How?
Now I’m glad I took the lazy way out and used form buttons on worksheets instead of creating a proper toolbars. Though I do have a pretty polished toolbar function that is now useless. Aaarrgh.
And thanks for doing nothing with the VBA. There’s so many things I want to do that are just one step beyond an Excel progam but not worth pursuing in a proper programming environment.
Yep, VBA(liike classic VB) had stood still for the last 10 ish years, it will be very intresting to see what MS do with the office programing languages in the future and the IDE.
I think the charts, colours and so forth have been missing in perious versions, in fact they have not changed significatly from 95, so they really really were long over due.
I am very depressed to hear the charts are less customisable; I had heard they were going for tacky glitter and fluff instead of a genuine expansion in the range and quality of chart types and symbols provided (hello, dot plots? box-and-whisker?), but I comforted myself that at least I would still be able to wrangle the program into producing something roughly acceptable.
Now you say that Microsoft are actually preventing people producing proper information graphics on their spreadsheet? Have they got a death wish?
My office has been using Excel 2007 for about 6 months now. The person who does the most work in Excel 2007 needed about a week to get used to all of the changes, but says now that the menus make so much more sense than they used to.
One HUGE problem we’ve noticed is with some of the functions of the Analysis Tookpak (previously an add-in and now incorporated in the main software). If a workbook uses the WORKDAY function from the Toolpak, it sometimes causes a problem with the formulas (showing up as #/NA and giving a file error message). Then the file will show the values/contents in the cells (but not the formulas).
We’ve searched and searched (and had a few hours of Microsoft support) and were unable to fix the problem, aside from redoing the formulas. A few other postings on the ‘net lead us to think that there’s actually some kind of bug that hasn’t been discovered yet.
I too am one of those who customised my toolbars to minimise the clicks needed to achieve an outcome. And for those of us who travel and / or just use a laptop touchpad lots – get some plasters, you’re going to need them as you spend so much time flitting from tab to tab to function button trying to achieve something. I think I can feel a court case for unwarranted friction burns coming on! Oh… and don’t bother customising the quick access toolbar unless you really are into using retro 1980’s style Lotus-type interfaces for adding and deleting icons – whoever thought this was a good idea was just plainly wrong!