Excel 2007 Formulas

Excel 2007 Formulas has been released. Each and every one of you should buy it. Well, not every one of you. One of you should get a copy courtesy of Daily Dose of Excel. I’ll even pay the shipping if you live in the United States. So get this off Mr. Spreadsheet’s Bookshelf and put it onto yours.

Send an email with the subject “Hook Me Up” and nothing in the message body. Type the subject line exactly (without the quotes, of course), and be sure to leave the body blank. I’ll be using VBA to randomly select one of the emails to determine the winner. If you don’t follow these instructions, VBA will exclude you from the list. Send that email by February 23rd, 2007 2:00 PM CST.

Haven’t upgraded? Don’t worry. There’s tons of great information that applies to older versions. Anything that’s exclusive to 2007 like Tables and new worksheet functions are clearly marked.

Oh yeah, one more thing: I reserve the right to change the rules, cancel the contest, not ship the book, move into your basement, and exclude anyone and everyone. Generally, to do anything that prevents legal troubles for me or stops people from complaining.

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16 thoughts on “Excel 2007 Formulas

  1. Dick:
    oH my god JW, I forgot the “Until” criteria and the Do Loop has been running for over an our now and we have purchased 65,536 copies off Amazon! What do we do?

    John:
    Quick lets hide in your basement! Mine is full of old out of print “Excel 2002 Bibles” ©.

    But seriously John that guy took out his “Amazon Rage” on your book and rated it 1! I think it is up to us to drum up a bit of support. Sadly I am too far from the States to qualify for a freebie so I might have to pay full price and expense it.

  2. I hate those stupid email disclaimers.

    No kidding. Absolutely worthless and a complete waste of bandwidth. Has there ever been a court case in which a stupid email disclaimer got someone or some company off the hook for something?

    Unfortunately, some people have no choice but to make themselves look like fools every time they send an email from their company account.

  3. Unfortunately, some people have no choice but to make themselves look like fools every time they send an email from their company account.

    Fortunately my company has no such asinine practices. And if anything stupid comes down from Corporate, I can easily change it, because I’m corporate.

  4. Speaking as a CPA working for a public accounting firm in the US, we are required to put certain stupid email disclaimers on our email as required by IRS Circular 230. Stupid or not, we have to do it.

    Anyway, I didn’t use my work email so there wasn’t a disclaimer on my email entry!

  5. According to UK law all (or nearly all) communications from a company must have the company number and registered address, including emails. Just came in this year, I think most people will ignore it till someone gets done.
    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/21/new_web_email_regulation/

    It seems a bit odd that if I answer a NG question about Excel from my codematic email address I need to include a load of pointless irrelevant stuff because its a company, so I don’t.

    cheers
    Simon

  6. Some stats: Of the 77 respondents so far, all have the correct subject, none are late (obviously), 3 that were otherwise valid are duplicates (all the same guy) (there are other duplicates that are invalid), and 45 have something in the body. Only 29 have followed the rules.

    Of the 45, 28 have less than five characters in the body and 11 have exactly one character in the body. Every email of the 28 that has the same number of characters in the body also has the same characters in the body, to wit:

    Char – ASCII codes
    1 – 160
    2 – 13,10
    3 – 160,13,10
    4 – 13,10,13,10

    I don’t know why these people have non-printing characters in their email, but I’m allowing them. The new rule is that if your email body contains only the characters 160, 13, 10, and 9, then it will be deemed to be empty and it will not be rejected.

    That results in 58 valid entries, 6 dupes. I’ll post the code I’m using Friday afternoon to minimize people trying to game the system.

  7. Dick,

    I don’t work on the tax side of my firm, I just follow orders. However, in scanning IRS Circular 230, I think I found what you were looking for.

    On page 25 of the Circular near the bottom of the left column there is a definition of a “marketed opinion.” The disclosures we put in our emails and other communications are more or less a CYA statement to indicate that the communication is not a marketed opinion, which is covered in items 5(ii)(A),(B), and (C) on that same page.

    Basically it states that the recipient cannot use the advice to avoid tax penalties, that the advice given is specific to the circumstances address, and that the taxpayer should seek advice based on their individual circumstances. Or something like that.

    So rather than trying to pick and choose what emails should be tagged with the disclosure, all email are tagged automatically when they go through the server.

    Now my brain hurts from reading IRS documents.

    Anyway, I hope that was what you were looking for.

  8. Hey Dick I couldn’t help noticing you had a pretty all encompassing disclaimer on your original rules.
    “I reserve the right to change the rules, cancel the contest, not ship the book, move into your basement, and exclude anyone and everyone. Generally, to do anything that prevents legal troubles for me or stops people from complaining. “

    for a guy who claims “I hate those stupid …. disclaimers so much.” that’s pretty rich !
    BTW: my corporate disclaimer is 1382 characters long

  9. Nice one Dick,
    Thanks for running the contest!
    I haven’t paid too much attention yet to Excel 2007, but I had a good knowledge of 2003 and earlier (and I don’t remember many differences in functions, more the irritating reshuffle of PivotTables over the years that embarrassed me while presenting training courses!)

    By the way we don’t have basements in NZ as most of our dwellings are single-storey. But you’re welcome to my garage instead.

    -Alex

  10. Well, 2:00 PM CST has come and gone and that means the contest is over. I’ll be poring over the entries this weekend weeding out duplicates and will provide you with a winner and some stats on Monday.

    Congrats to VReed who slipped in just under the deadline, although it looks like it might be a duplicate. Tsk, tsk. And thanks to Sue who just missed the deadline. You see I already coded the part that checks for late entries. If nobody sent a late one, I might never have know if it worked.


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