Daily Dose of Excel

Via the US ISV Developer Team Blog

Microsoft Office 2007 SP1 will be available for download Dec 11. The improvements in 2007 Office System SP1 are in response to direct feedback from power users at large organizations or indirect feedback from home and Office users through the Dr. Watson bug-reporting system.

I haven’t seen any details about what’s been done, but don’t expect any UI changes or charting improvements. They might have fixed some stuff, buy I’m not getting my hopes up.

OK everyone.

Here is a (poorly designed) chart showing the result so far.

It looks like the icons at the top are winning. I agree however that for beginners, buttons with text might be better.

I have cooked up an option D though. What about this one:

So which is it? A, B, C or D?

Regards,

Jan Karel Pieterse
JKP Application Development Services

Hi everyone,

I’ve had some remarks about the design of my Name Manager.
Because it has so many functions, I (to be more precise, we: Charles Williams and I) had a hard time cramming it al into one user interface.

Because (in my opinion) this is a tool aimed at the more proficient Excel user and even more so, the developer I deliberately tried to keep it all on one form so as to have all this functionality on names in one spot.

What would I like you all to do? Below there are three screenshots.

A. Current UI, icons on command buttons, buttons at the bottom of the screen
B. First Alternative: Icons on buttons, buttons at top, making it look like a toolbar.
C. Alternative 2: Buttons at top, text on buttons: no need to wait for the tooltips.

So which do you like best, A, B or C?

A:
B:
C:

Based on the comments and emails, I think I know how this one’s going to turn out. Should Daily Dose win, the second place finisher will win the prize. Voting starts when you can see this post and ends promptly at 8:00PM CDT (GMT -5, I believe. But don’t quote me on that.)

Don’t feel bad if your submission didn’t make the list. Some were just too lame, some nearly obscene, and others were from unregistered readers. Rules are rules, even if they’re stupid rules. Thanks to everyone who submitted.

I should also mention that some of the submissions were anagrams (more than one, actually), and while none of them made the list, that would have been a far more interesting contest. I didn’t publish those submission so you could use them for the second anniversary contest.

Jonathan had an excellent comment in the Principal Payment post. Why create an array formula when the Analysis Toolpack already has the CUMPRINC function. Well, I said I couldn’t find a function to do it, and I wasn’t lying. That doesn’t mean one doesn’t exist, only that I couldn’t find it.

The reason I couldn’t find it was because I don’t have the Analysis Toolpack Add-In loaded. Every time I come across an ATP function, I think, “I don’t want to load that Add-In for one function”. So I don’t. But if I would just load it, then the next five times I need an ATP function, I wouldn’t have to say that.

So the question of the day is:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about when I will stop writing code that works in Excel 97 (like the Split function, for example). I’m interested in to see what other people are doing.