Office Pioneer : Excel

Over-protected spreadsheets

GillLeFevre — Fri, 23 Jun 2006 16:31:00 GMT

Something, somewhere has changed with protected spreadsheets. In between 2003 and 2007 they decided to get a whole lot tougher.

I discovered that this week when I went to paste a bunch of answers into a protected spreadsheet - only to be told that I couldn’t: "You cannot use this command on a protected sheet..."

Cue frantic email sent to the owner of the spreadsheet… who fortunately had a workaround.

Instead of choosing paste, just right click, select Paste Special, and choose Values.

Easy when you know how!

Enjoy it while it lasts….. No more Save PDF - Out of the Box

Charlene — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 18:48:00 GMT

Unfortunately one of the coolest features of Beta 2 has now been removed from the final product.

The ability to Save as PDF or our own XPS format, the crowd pleaser at product demos, will no longer be included in the final release due to pressure from Adobe.

But worry not, you will still be able to reap all the benefits of this feature by downloading free software that we be releasing to give you this capability…

Instant Gratification and Beta 2

Charlene — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 12:26:00 GMT

Yes, I have to confess I am the kind of person who can eat a bar of chocolate before dinner and I am quite happy to read the final page of a book before I start at the beginning.

So, I am loving all the small and immediate benefits of Beta 2, the things that can make a big difference in an instant and don’t require swotting up on all the new features and what you can do with them.

**Jargon Alert** Contextual Command Tabs is the catchy name given to the new feature that brings all the relevant commands to your fingertips based on what you are doing at the time. So, when the you are working in a table in a Word document (or indeed in any of the programs you can use tables), the top navigation (known as the Ribbon ) shows you all the Table commands and tools, and when you select a picture all the Picture tools appear as if by magic. When you combine this with the minibar (someone has been having fun coming up with this jargon) which gives you a floating command box with all the most used formatting tools (colour, font, size, etc) when you highlight a chunk of text, the time it takes to create and modify documents can literally be cut in half!

And, with all the extra time on my hands ;-) there is no reason why I should not be checking out the 2007 Microsoft Office Learning Portal to learn how I can use Beta 2 to take even more of the tedious admin time out of my day. After all, I do always enjoy the whole book more than just the final page.

Paint by Numbers: Back in Fashion and Here to Stay

Charlene — Fri, 02 Jun 2006 20:21:00 GMT

Never again will I have to break out in a cold sweat over the words “I’m just sending you over the spreadsheet to review the figures”.

This previously meaningless (to me) list of numbers...

… can be transformed into this fab chart which shows in an instant everything I need to know.

Just by highlighting the table and clicking on the, memorably named, Conditional Formatting button in Excel, I can choose whether I want my data to reveal itself to me in the form of bars, colours or symbols.

So, now I can be excited (in a very geeky way J) when I get sent my spreadsheets of marketing results because, at last, I can fathom what on earth they mean!!

No surprise to me then that the rumours are that in 2 days, over half a million people have signed up to try out Beta 2…