Today I took my first look at Excel 2007 tables. I’ve hardly use Excel 2007, for obvious reasons, so I’ve not really played with many of the “new” features.
I did a bit of research and basically there are already a few good spots out there for table related stuff:
An incredibly cheesy Microsoft video, it does show all the main features (doesn’t that table look professional!)
Jan Karel Pieterses’ introduction and VBA methods
And Ron de Druin VBA page here
This chart shows my feeling towards tables in Excel 2007 over the last 3 hours:
In summary, I think tables have been done really well, there are easy to use and makes sense. I think that the new reference system (table name[column]) is good, but just like named ranges, can cause as many issues as it might solved, especially when used by relatively low skilled Excel users. Most of the stuff that I can see in tables was already there, and has “just” been made much easier to get at, I like the auto-update-y nature of tables, but that always worries me a bit too.
Just for completeness I have done a quick video to add to the tables database!
The major breakthrough was the introduction of Lists to 2003. In fact, this is the killer feature that convinced me to upgrade from 2000 to 2003.
Tables in 2007 are an evolved version of these Lists. While formatting and referencing within tables has improved greatly, the basic functionality was already present. I have not really found anything in the 2007 Tables that is a must-have enhancement, mostly the changes are in the “okay, that’s nice” category. For example, the database-like referencing of records and fields looks pretty cool, but it has tripped me up more than once.
Hi Jon,
That’s where I’m at to, although I keep an open mind on this things ‘cus you never know when someone might suddenly do something very cool with them!
I have a couple of videos to post not sure why the first one is not showing, but the second one which will talk about referencing etc., shows some of the “issues” with the new system. I don’t think it is necessarily a better way to reference data.
Interested to hear what others think.
Table references are slower than Dynamic Names
[...] asked about Tables in Excel 2007, and Sam had some interest in function performance. I did a quick video about tables in Excel 2007, which I need to compliment with one about how to use the new referencing system too, but that’s [...]