I don’t really know anything about Analysis Services, but MS have just pushed out some addins for leverageing this part of SQL2005 from Excel 2007 – Thought this might be useful to some folks (I’m thinking of Will!)
Tag: XL 2007
Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 (visually)
Cant find a command in the new Excel 2007 IU? this might help:
Excel 2003 to Excel 2007 command reference guide
Love those ribbons…
Excel 2007, what’s the story
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?????
Beyond Menus and Toolbars in Microsoft Office
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!