Today was my deadline for turning in the final chapters for Excel 2007 Bible. All that remains is the Preface, and that should take me about 30 minutes. But the book is certainly not finished. It will be reviewed by the project editor, a copy editor, and a technical editor. When the next Office 2007 beta is released, I’ll have one more chance to make changes, additions, and make sure the screen shots are accurate.
I was surprised to see that the book is already listed on Amazon, and it has a sales rank of 172,384. How can that be?
The Amazon listing (and also the book cover mock-up) indicates that the book’s CD will include a trial version of my Power Utility Pak add-in. Unfortunately, that’s not the case. PUP will require some major changes before it works well with Excel 2007. I plan on making a special version that will work only with Excel 2007, but I won’t have time to do that until the books are finished. Next up is Excel 2007 VBA Programming For Dummies. That will be followed by Excel 2007 Power Programming With VBA, and then the fun one: Excel 2007 Charts.
After working with Excel 2007, I’m starting to like it quite a bit. A few weeks ago, I turned the corner and realized that I much prefer Excel 2007 over Excel 2003. It’s really just a matter of getting used to the new interface. Now, I have a hard time remembering where the commands are in Excel 2003. A key difference is appearance. The new fonts and graphics are just much nicer to work with. When I open a file in Excel 2003, it looks old and clunky to me. And the charts look atrocious compared to the new charts.
Excel 2007 certainly isn’t perfect. Some of the deficiencies, I think, will be fixed in the final version. But we’ll just have to live with the other problems — the main one being the inability for the end user to customize the user interface. A major upgrade like this involves trade-offs. You give up some things and get other things in return. All things considered, the scale definitely tips in favor of Excel 2007.
(also posted at J-Walk Blog)
Congratulations John ! This “next version revision” must have been unusually demanding. I’ll email you a cold beer as soon as I figure out how to.
Best wishes Harald
Congratulations John. I’ll definitely by buying the book when it comes out. The learning curve for the new Excel 2007 is quite steep and your book will certainly help everyone upgrading get up to speed.
John, major congrats on the 2007 Bible, I’m sure that required huge effort… I’m really looking forward to reading it. :-)
(Btw, Amazon pre-sells their books, so one can put it in their shopping cart and be notified as soon as its available. It’s a nice feature. Already having a sales-rank though sounds silly, but I guess they are counting pre-sale orders for this statistic? I can’t think of what else it could be.)
John,
My congratulations for the 2007 Bible.
So You imply that I will be forced to replace my signed copy of ‘Excel for Windows 95 Bible’ with this one ;)
“I plan on making a special [PUP] version that will work only with Excel 2007?
If I recall it right the same scenario occured when Excel 2000 hit the market. Both then and now reflect a larger gap between the versions of Excel.
As long as the upcoming version of PUP works 101 % with the Swedish version I will be pleased ;)
Kind regards,
Dennis
Dennis –
“If I recall it right the same scenario occured when Excel 2000 hit the market. Both then and now reflect a larger gap between the versions of Excel.”
People did not have to relearn Excel when they upgraded from 97 (or 95) to 2000. (You even say in your post that you still have not upgraded from the Excel 95 Bible.) The interface worked much the same in 2000 as earlier, programming was much the same, and the cost-benefit was a slam dunk.
The upgrade from Excel 4 to 95, or that from 95 to 97, was more disruptive than any upgrade within the 97 to 2003 time frame. But I think the upgrade to 2007 is more than any before. The changes are more significant, and the installed base is so much more substantial.
Jon,
I view it from a ‘PUP’ view ;)
The 95’s Bible is kept in my ‘Excel museum together’ with, for instance, an original package for Excel 2.1d for Windows and Ouattro Pro for DOS. I would like to get a copy of the first Excel version on Macintosh as well.
On my ‘shell space for learning’ I can only see .NET, C#, XML and SQL Server 2005 books!
Kind regards,
Dennis
John,
the Amazon ranking is based on pre-sale orders. And I’ve just added one pre-order because I think I’ll be needing it (had very little time to play with 2007 to date).
Thanks for putting in the work so the lazy gits like me can just get you to work out all the hard stuff for us! ;-)
>>I plan on making a special version that will work only with Excel 2007
Is that because of the ribbon, a desire to use the new file formats or other issues?
Jim
Jim, the main reason is that several of the PUP utilities rely on CommandBars, and they simply don’t work with Excel 2007. Plus, I want to make a PUP tab and create my own command groups.
John…
Would be nice if you created a Pup Taskpane……Channces are people will at least see it…straingt away…
je n’arrive pas à insérer des lignes ou des colonnes dans certains fichiers Exel 2007 il me répond IMPOSSIBLE DE DEPLACER DE OBJETS EN DEHORS DE LA FEUILLE
si vous avez la solution Merci