Office 2007 has been out now for well over a year, and I’ve been using it in some capacity since before the beta kicked off over a year before its commercial release. For example 45 is shown as 0,45 100 as 1 etc. Every time I enter a number into a cell in Excel, it divides it by 100. With Excel 2008 for Mac, everyone from beginners to professional number crunchers can. Use compelling charts and graphs to show stakeholders what you mean at a glance. Microsoft Excel Mac 2008, Full, Standalone.It supersedes Office 2004 for Mac (which did not have Intel native code) and is the Mac OS X equivalent of Office 2007. Basic Functions XY Scatter Graphs/Trendlines Forecasting with Trendlines Localized Trendlines Bar Charts Pie Graphs.Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac is a version of the Microsoft Office productivity suite for Mac OS X. This review is based on my two and a half years of experience with the new version of Excel, including beta testing and development work.Techniques in Excel 2008 for Mac Users. I’ve decided it’s about time I gave a coherent review, rather than posting bits and pieces in various forums.Some are pretty obvious, and the Ribbon was designed to make them so, but others stubbornly stay hidden. They all are still there, and eventually most are found. The user’s first reaction upon seeing this wonderful new interface is “Wow!” This is followed soon after by panic, as the user desperately tries to figure out where all the old controls have gone. After a decade or more, the familiar menubar and toolbars are gone, replaced by a large monolithic Ribbon splayed across the top of the application window. Select the heading you wish to.By far the biggest change in Office 2007 is the complete redesign of the user interface. Headings can be found under Pick style to apply.The screen shot below shows that my typical Excel 2003 toolbars plus the Drawing toolbar (an extra toolbar) is still smaller than the Ribbon.Ultra-Enhanced Excel 2003 menu and command bars (left)The Ribbon is rather sparsely populated with controls: some buttons are huge, like the Paste button, and spacing between others is greater than in the old toolbars. The Ribbon does take up a lot of space atop the window, more than a typical menubar plus two rows of toolbars. This was kept obscure it took me, a seasoned Excel user, a month to find it, cleverly buried under the Paste dropdown button.The Ribbon isn’t all that bad, as far as it goes, and a typical user probably becomes reasonably comfortable with it within a week or two.
Microsoft 2008 Excel Formatting Pallete As A Toolbar Professional Number Crunchers![]() ![]() You must right click on the object and choose the Format Object item from the pop up menu, or select the object and press Ctrl+1 (the numeral one).Many of the dialogs relating to shapes and charts are now modeless, so that the user can interact with objects in the Excel workspace while the dialog is showing. Double clicking an object activates the Ribbon tab that Excel thinks you might want to use, but the dialog does not appear. Excel 2007 breaks this behavior. For fifteen years users have double clicked on objects to access the Format Object dialog. Proshow producer 503410 serial keyIn Classic Excel, an entire visit to a dialog was saved as a single entry in the Undo/Redo/Repeat queue, whereas Excel 2007 saves each individual action. There are downsides as well. Second, other objects can be selected and formatted without dismissing the dialog. First, the formatting is applied to the object as it is selected in the dialog. There are a number of third party utilities that provide mechanisms for modification of the Ribbon through the user interface: one of these is Patrick Schmid’s RibbonCustomizer. It makes use of RibbonX, a flavor of XML designed specifically for the Ribbon. Thus the F4 shortcut is essentially broken in Excel 2007.The ribbon is actually straightforward to customize programmatically. In Excel 2007, since each action is recorded separately to the queue, the Repeat Last Action command repeats only the absolute last action, not the entire history of the visit to the dialog. This is a great productivity feature of Classic Excel. Then you could select another axis, press the F4 shortcut key to repeat the last action, and every format applied to the first axis would be applied to the second. The controls are housed in a system of tabs so that only a subset of controls are visible at a given time, and the “right” tab is often not visible. The new Ribbon interface takes up more space than even a highly enhanced Classic Excel menu and toolbar environment, but offers fewer controls in this space. Seasoned users will soon notice a distinct loss of productivity, beyond the temporary problem of not knowing where to find familiar commands. Perhaps you could fake it with a modeless userform in fact, I have been toying with some custom dialogs to mimic my favorite features of Classic Excel.In summary, Excel 2007 has introduced a new user interface paradigm, designed for improved discoverability of features for new users. In addition, I’ve found the following book to be very comprehensive and very helpful.RibbonX – Customizing the Office 2007 RibbonBy Robert Martin, Ken Puls, and Teresa Hennig.Despite the ease of programming of the Ribbon, the undocking and tearaway features of Classic Excel cannot be replicated in Excel 2007. One of the best web pages is Change the ribbon in Excel 2007 by Ron de Bruin. Stay tuned.To be fair, I’m not too disturbed by the space used by the Ribbon. When clients ask about upgrading, I tell them what I’ve written about here, and I support them whatever they decide.I have two more posts in the works, one on general changes to the charting engine in Excel 2007, and the other on the charting dialogs developed for Excel 2007. Because of the productivity penalty I’ve described, I continue to use Excel 2003 for my own direct use personally and in my business. Most of my work is directed by clients, and involves upgrading of Classic Excel programs and interfaces to work nicely within Excel 2007. Finally the new modeless formatting dialogs seem at first to be helpful, but they come with the loss of Classic Excel’s Repeat Last Action functionality.I use Excel 2007 a fair amount these days, and I don’t really mind it too much. I filed two this week based on posts in online forums. One of my fun activities in the Excel side, though, is documenting and reporting bogs. When I am doing real work in the Excel side, I do feel handcuffed, and I feel like my mouse is going to wear out. Most of my work in it is on the programming side, so I don’t have to be very productive in the Excel side. Later in the beta, of course, the ribbon expanded by more than a tool bar in height.I don’t dislike Excel 2007 all that much. I brought it up because the initial noise out of Microsoft during the beta was that the Ribbon was Even Smaller than the Classic Office menu bar and two tool bars. I have my own notions about charts, but will be interested to hear your thoughts (preview: I want my Source data dialog back because adding series now is a pain).As far as the Ribbon is concerned, I don’t really care for it. Fortunately VBA still works, so a workaround isn’t too traumatic.I’m one of those people who has to be productive in Excel and thankfully we have not transitioned over to Excel 2007 yet (it gives me more time to get acclimated).I’ll be interested to hear your comments in regards to Excel charting. Second, there is no way in the Excel 2007 UI to change the width of up/down bars in a chart, for example, a candlestick chart.
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