Comments on: Confessions of an Excel Junkie

By: Julian Knight

Julian Knight — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 15:07:00 +0000

I now use Altiris SVS for testing stuff like this. It is much less of a hastle than a virtual environment and I can use the app as normal. The only thing it won't let me do is run two overlapping applications together (e.g. IE6 and IE7). 2007b2 works fine under SVS.

Regards, Jules.

By: Jack

Jack — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 09:25:00 +0000

To change the font in Excel directly from the keyboard, make sure that the Formatting bar is viewable, then type Ctrl+Shift+F.

By: John Crayon

John Crayon — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 07:52:00 +0000

Regarding font, it was mentioned above that you can press Ctrl-Shift-F to get directly into the Font box.

Everybody should be aware that in both Word and Excel you can press Ctrl-Shift-P to be taken directly into the Font Size box, and just type your font size.

Cheers,
JC

By: John Walkenbach

John Walkenbach — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:57:00 +0000

http://j-walkblog.com/images/translatebutton.gif

By: John Walkenbach

John Walkenbach — Thu, 13 Jul 2006 00:56:00 +0000

Good question, Mike. I have no idea. For those who haven’t installed O07, here it is:

By: Mike Alexander

Mike Alexander — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 23:23:00 +0000

Trivia:
What language and character is represented in the Translate button in the Proofing group?

By: Jim

Jim — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 23:16:00 +0000

I just installed my vb6 back on my machine to start writing some com add-ins but I’m not going to waste my time for 007. I don’t think this well take off for quite awhile.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 23:03:00 +0000

Dick -

Good review. The only thing you've got wrong, and which the Office UI guys have been saying wrong all along, is about the idea that "everything is in one place", because it's not really in one place, at least not in 2D space-time as we understand it. The various tabs of the ribbon may only appear in one place (whether this is an advantage over Excel 97-2003 is debatable), but not at the same time, so you still have to hunt for what you know is there, and even if you know which tab it's on, you still need to click on it, because in my llimited experience, the one you want is not active.

John -

Yes, it appears that many of my tricks will still work, but I'm way behind in testing them, and some don't look quite right because labels don't really line up the way we've learned. And I think it's a race between releasing on time vs. releasing with the charting working properly.

- Jon

By: Stephen Bullen

Stephen Bullen — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 16:08:00 +0000

“I’m hopeful that someone is going to develop an add-in that takes all the pain out of customizing the ribbon, both from a migration standpoint and a future customization standpoint. It’s just xml right? How hard can it be? Hopefully Stephen will let us know when he’s done.”

I spent a lot of time looking at it and come to the conclusion that MS has provided about 80% of the functionality that such a full-fidelity production-quality addin would require. In other words, they haven’t exposed enough of the internals for us to manipulate them. I think the best we’ll get is Patrick Schmidt’s addins (http://www.pschmidt.net), which allow us to move the groups around the toolbars – but even that contains so much hard-coded config stuff, it only works with an English UI and will be broken as soon as MS modify their tabs.

I think a more likely solution will be for “someone” to create a custom task pane to replicate the old-style toolbars (i.e. a set of buttons that can run some VBA), which can be docked and floated on the screen. I’ve written a COM Addin which allows us to show normal VBA userforms as task panes, so creating a userform with buttons to run things shouldn’t be too hard…

By: Sam

Sam — Wed, 12 Jul 2006 05:51:00 +0000

I uninstalled the office12 beta yesterday….from my PC…

I clicked on the Excel XP icon from the Programs menu…..It asked me for a CD……I was petrified…..What if the 007 has “s****d” up XP I thought…. What if all my fav addins and toolbars stopped working….fortunately I located the CD in the junk box…. and things are back to normal…

John is right about about 007 being a non free beta for 2010….

But to all MVP’s….. I see a great business opportunity…in 007

.. A addin which disables the Ribbon X and gets back the menu/toolbar system will outsell anything you sold before….my guess is it will outsell the “official” copies of 007 as well..

John…Stephen (they said it couldnt be done…)…Ivan (Can do….)….BillG.(Is free lancing is he? )…It cant be very difficult…

…..do mention me in the credits…. a free copy would be gladly accepted…

Regards
Sam