The top-10 reasons I’m looking forward to Excel 12.
- A new name. Will it be called Excel Vista? If so, I want to go on record as being the first person to point out that the name contains the word Elvis.
- Updating my books will be easier. It’s no fun trying to update an Excel book when there’s very little that’s new. In other words, readers can look forward to scads of those little “NEW FEATURE” icons in the margins.
- New newsgroup questions. Everybody knows that 95% of the newsgroups questions have already been asked and answered. When Excel 12 is released, that number may drop as low as 90% (at least for a while).
- Terminology challenges. I love a good challenge, and mastering Excel 12’s terminology definitely qualifies. In past, I could write: Select Format – Conditional Formatting to display the Conditional Formatting dialog box. With Excel 12, it will probably require two pages to describe.
- A new splash screen. It’s the little things that make life worthwhile. I’m really looking forward to seeing something different during those 3-4 seconds while Excel loads.
- New Help system. Everybody complains about the Help system. Now we’ll be able to come up with an entirely new set of complaints.
- Fiddlin’ with the XML files. I think it will be fun to come up with utilities that work directly with the XML files. It opens the door to a whole new class of pranks.
- Updating my stack of paper calcs. In many of my books, I include a sidebar that calculates how tall the stack of paper would be if you filled every cell in a worksheet and printed it out. With Excel 12, I may also be able to calculate the number of trees required.
- The diagrams. Playing with the new diagram features is a great way to waste time, yet still look productive. I can’t wait to animate those suckers.
- Finding the object model lapses. You just know that some of the new features won’t be fully accessible using VBA. Who will be the first to find them?
What else?
With the plethora of Elvis sitings and impersonators since August 1977: let me be the first to say Excel Vista contains Elvis x.
To spelling words with the new, more plentiful, column letters.
To seeing which features got promoted and which got demoted in the new UI system.
Oh yes! The Excel Word Challenge will on again!
Number 3 is a pet peeve of mine. I love forums and groups and the extremely helpful individuals that inhabit them, but hate searching archives. It never fails that I’m directed to a previous post – no matter how I searched in the first place.
You are being optimistic that you will only see the spash screen for 3-4 seconds aren’t you?
(Windows Vista seems to be released in only 5 or was it 7 versions…) so
– Write a special book edition for every available
version of Excel 12 (don’t forget the server-
version!).
– Sell Your recently new computer for less then 1 %
of the price as it’s technical outdated.
– Take a bankloan in order to invest in a new
computer with a 64-bits processor, 16 GB RAM and
with a graphic card that got at least 1 GB RAM.
BTW, to make it future save – buy 2 x 10 TB disks.
– Take another bankloan to invest in at least 2 x 21?
flat screens where You see column A in one and
column B on the other screen.
– For colourblind or semi colourblind users it will
be an excellent possibility to learn more about
Excel 12 new colour scheme.
#5 Yes, 3-4 seconds will it take with above hardware.
#6 Sorry John, it’s already here as the new helpsystem was released with the VS.NET 2003, especially the MSDN-library.
If You want some good advise how to crash it just let me know…If You want to get the helpsystem back just re-install Windows!
Kind regards,
Dennis
EdH:
The first thing that impressed me about Excel 2003 was how much more quickly it loaded compared to 2000 or XP, all on the same machine. It’s not unlikely that a new, from the ground up Excel might be equally fast booting up.
The only other thing about Excel 2003 that impressed me was the nice list feature, which I hear is greatly enhanced in Excel 12. The startup speed and list feature is enough to make Excel 2003 my version of choice (though too many clients are still using 2000 that I am also very familiar there).
– Jon
I’m looking forward to them having removed the annoying “debug.print” statements in the analysis toolpack – the ones they left in by mistake in XL 2003 (or was it earlier) :o)
I’m also sure they will at last give me the option to turn off the REALLY annoying log-axis alert that tells me each and every single time I have negative or zero values. That is, without having to resort to code.
I’m really-really looking forward to improved 3D graphing tools … to have numeric X & Y axes insted of category ones.
Oh, and all the “Pap” that you mentioned.
The stuff to help the user who is too clueless to find the “Help” option to find things they never knew existed and hopefully keep the rest of us guessing by automatically moving options around as we work :o)
Oh, and clippy was not Pap. Can we have a mandatory full scree version with sound?
M