Published Now and Again for Business Users of Microsoft Excel.
Introducing Office 2007
+ PDF Handbook for Office
Charley Kyd
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
If you like this newsletter, please forward it to
other Excel users.
Just minutes ago, as I was preparing to send this message, I received a
workbook from a reader in India.
"I came across this interesting piece in which Excel has been used to draw a
village scene in India," he wrote. "I thought it fit to share with you." I
liked the workbook, even though ExcelUser is dedicated to the business
use of Excel, and the workbook serves no business purpose that I can see. What
the workbook does do is to illustrate (pun intentional) the wide variety
of purposes that Excel can serve.
If you're interested, you can
download it here.
Introducing Excel 2007If you would like to beta test Office 2007, you'll probably get your chance
soon.
Microsoft now is accepting Beta 2 registrations. To register, go to
Key Microsoft Web Sources
Explain Office 2007 Features and then
follow the link to the right of my byline.
People have tended to look at recent upgrades of
Excel and asked, "So what's changed?" You definitely won't say that -- and mean
it -- when you see this version of Excel. The changes have been massive, and
obvious. I can't talk yet about any of
the changes to Excel based on my own knowledge or opinions. But the
Web Sources
article provides information about some of the many changes that Microsoft has
brought to Excel. And the article offers links to the key Microsoft web pages
where you can learn much more about Excel 2007.
I begin the article with a short discussion of
Excel's user interface (UI).
As you can see from the first figure in the
article, the UI has changed completely. We no longer have menus. We have the
Ribbon.
The Ribbon probably will become one of the most widely discussed changes to
Excel. In fact, I've just noticed that already it's more widely discussed on the
web than I ever would have guessed. To see what I mean,
use Google to search for:
ribbon "excel 12" OR
"excel 2007" Today, I get 13,300 hits
for this search.
I wonder how soon that search string will return more than one million hits?
Make Your Local Excel Guru Scratch His Head If you took a poll of your favorite Excel
gurus, their favorite guru likely would be Bob Umlas.
Last year Bob wrote a little book titled,
"This isn't Excel, it's Magic." In addition to useful tricks, this book
describes some clever ones that are merely fun. Here's one you might pull on
your local Excel guru: In an empty
spreadsheet, enter =NA() in cell D1. Copy the range D1:D2 to D3:D100, creating a
column of alternating #N/A and blank cells.
Select all of column D. Press the F5 key to
launch the Go to dialog. Choose Special. In the Go To Special dialog, click on
Formulas then choose OK. After you do so, Excel will select every cell that
contains =NA(). Change the font to 100.
Press the Delete key to erase the =NA() formulas. Click and drag to set the
column back to its original width. Choose Format, Row, Height to set the row
height to 12.75. Now look at your row
number labels. You will see labels for only the even rows. The labels for your
odd-numbered rows have disappeared. Now that is really odd.
Quick Way to Close Without Saving
Finally, here's a useful trick from
Bob's book... Suppose you're shutting
down for the day and you want to close all your open files without saving any of
them.
Hold down your Shift key then click on the X
in the top-right corner of your screen to close Excel. Excel will ask if you
want to save the first file. After you choose No -- with your Shift key still
pressed -- Excel will close all your other files without asking, then shut down.
Or, suppose you want to close all your files
without closing Excel.
Hold down your shift key and choose File.
Because the Shift key is pressed you will see the Close All item in the File
menu. If you continue to hold down the Shift key when you choose Close All,
Excel will close all open files without asking whether you want them to be
saved. If you release the Shift key before you choose Close All, Excel will ask
whether to save each unsaved file.Enough for now.
More later,
Charley
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