28 January 2006 by Ross McLean
Microsoft hold the average user has 4 or more toolbars displayed at any one time. This represents quite a lot of the screen “real-estate”. This is especially pertinent with the advent of “wide screen” type set ups popular on many laptops. A colleague of mine has about 25 rows on display, that’s on a 17″ screen! (well, “wide screen”).
I believe is that many uses pull up a menu bars and end up keeping the whole thing, for just a few of the buttons. But its easy to streamline your toolbars in excel.
Position your mouse somewhere on a toolbar (it’s best if you go for a place where there are no buttons). Right clicking will bring up a context menu, at the very bottom of which is a “Customise” option Click it!
Next click the “Commands” tab, from here you can pick all of you favourite buttons, and simply drag them all on to ONE tool bar. Better than that, you can even drag them on to the Menu bar (which it’s self is a toolbar).
If you can’t find the button you’re looking for, try clicking on the “Toolbars” tab, then checking the tool bar which holds the button you’re after. This displays the toolbar, and you can now drag and drop the button direct from the toolbars on the screen.
Now that’s better, I’ve got my screen back!!!!
Tags: MS, Tips, UI
Categories: General •
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15 December 2005 by Ross McLean
This is interesting! mostly I don’t agree with it.
Office 12 is an upgrade I wouldn’t mind paying for, that is, assuming that work didn’t let us get free copies. Those are big words for me, considering my “I Hate Microsoft” series of blog entries. I can imagine making documents faster with Office 12, or at least I can imagine making better looking documents in the same amount of time. Excel, which has been less functional for me than the spreadsheet program I used on my Apple IIe, looks like it will be come a useful tool for data analysis.
As far as I’m aware Excels ability to analyse data has stayed the same, there are about 10 new functions, and no new chart types. POPPER 3-D charts are still not supported.
… the UI revamp, that it’s more than a marketing trick. The conventional wisdom out there is “Everything I need was in office [95, 97, 2000].” (For me it was Word 95). They collected a ton of data (including over a billion Office sessions) that told a different story. On a list of the top ten most requested features for Office: four of them were already in Office.
The new IU looks good, but i bet it will throw up a host of problems, It will also mean a load of new coding for controlling menu bars – if they still work in the same way, which I doubt they will now, could balls up my dictor app’s.
Another observation from the data was that the average user spends more time with Office (2.6 hrs/day) than they do with their spouse (2.4 hrs/day). When you take 400 million users * 2.6 hrs/day, it seems worth improving that experience.
Well, it’s about time that changed, nice looking software or not!
Tags: MS, UI, XL 2007
Categories: General •
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