Comments on: Excel 2007, what’s the story

by: Anne

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 08:36:15 +0000

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!

by: Mika

Wed, 09 Jan 2008 16:54:31 +0000

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.

by: derek

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 22:46:07 +0000

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?

by: ross

Thu, 15 Jun 2006 07:57:00 +0000

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.

by: Zach

Wed, 14 Jun 2006 20:48:25 +0000

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.