14 thoughts on “Excel 2003 Lessons”

1. I imagine video tutorials / lessons are popular seeing how they are popping up with increasing frequency. I, however, am like you. Don’t see myself sitting at a computer learning about something or watching step by step lessons. Reading is *substantially* faster. Heck, even when it comes to watching a movie, my preferred method is with my finger on the fast forward button.

2. I don’t have the patience for video learning. With a book, or with a multi-tabbed browser, I can flip around and find what I need when I need it. For me this doesn’t work as a serial approach.

3. If you’d like to download the file (it’s in WMA format, of course), right-click the embedded media player and click Properties. Click the File tab, and highlight the text in the Location field. Press Ctrl+C, them paste it to your brower’s address bar. The file will be downloaded. At least it did for me. Maybe some settings determine what happens with the file.

   Oops… iPods can’t handle WMA files, can they? I guess you could convert them to MP3.

4. Thanks J-Walk.

   I don’t think these are video lessons. I only clicked on two of them, but they were both audio lessons. That is, someone reads the text that’s on the screen. And as Tushar says, they do it substantially slower than I can read it. Maybe I just didn’t get far enough to see the screen shots/video, which is a possibility.

5. I’m still using Excel 2000. My whole company is: 1000+ employees.

   I wonder if a company will ever say, “This is the final version: it does everything our customers want.”

   No, of course not. Silly me. They’ll then say, “We’re not rich enough. Let’s add some frivolous features that will look cool, sell more books, subtlety remove features that are useful now, and spawn more reasons for upgrades. Like Microsoft Money!”

   Okay, RANT OFF. Sorry. I haven’t had my morning coffee yet. :)

6. There are some good new features in Office 2007. The problem with a mature application is making it “new and different”, to encourage people who are satisfied with “old and the same” to upgrade. This must have been a major driver for Office 2007.

7. I have nothing against new and different. I’ve just switched to using 2007 full time after a year of just playing with it, but I’m having a hard time appreciating the improvements because of the minor annoyances they bring. For example, even though I can still Alt-D, S to get to data sort, I have to grab the mouse the select the column to sort on. I can tab forever and not get into that field. It’s a small gripe, for sure, but every time I have to do it is just a little bit frustrating.

   And despite all the upgrades, there’s some simple things that just don’t work right. For example, I can take a list of approx. 4000 rows and 2 columns. Every other row is numeric and I want to delete those rows. Select special cells works fine to select them, but deleting the rows takes well over 2 minutes. This is a small chunk of data and I’m doing this on a 2.4GHz quad-core rig with 3GB of RAM. What gives?

   To be fair, as an occasional user of Word and Powerpoint, I found the new interface very helpful and not at all annoying. I’m sure the casual Excel user feels the same way about the new Excel interface. It’s the power user who takes the hit with the major upgrade.

8. I guess you’re unenticed by the Flash “The Microsoft Office Fluent user interface demo” http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/products/HA101679471033.aspx
   But ” Help for Excel 2007? http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/FX100646951033.aspx?CTT=96&Origin=CL100570551033 (or if you wish Excel 2003 and everything else is linked there) has “solution/learning” webpages with illustrations/screenshots, and a compact list of topics right there. I imagine most of you here rely on KBs and will reach no epiphanies here, but it’s a different organization – more like topics than keywords. E.g. “File conversion and compatibility” http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/CH100648071033.aspx is a handy reference guide for 2007. (Personally I hadn’t found office.microsoft.com to be very useful in earlier years; it SEEMS like they’ve significantly enhanced its usefulness.)

9. help.
   My company has a mix of excel 2000 and excel 2003.

   I have very important and widely used document taht has lins to a database. A couple of wierd things are happening.

   First I deleted all macros yet I still get an enable macros prompt when opening- anyone know why?
   Second, because of these links,users get a prompt to update links. Occasionally when users get one of these docs sent to them and they get this prompt, and answer NO, it updates the link anyway. What is so strange, is the workbook somehow gets data from another document attached to it, so even on computers without this database, it still updates. This only happens on computers with excel 2003. Why is this prompt instructing not to update being ignored, and how is this data hitch-hiking on the document? When this happens, all subsequent documents seem to have the same problem, with the same data getting populated.

   Any ideas? email me at flehmann@clopay.com

10. Where can I go to get questions answered about locking formulas into cells so that I can copy info in cells but not the formula.

11. I prefer reading books…

    Hi Doug Cassidy, you can use copy and paste special>values to copy contents and not the formula.

12. I have a 3-inch (instead of .5 inch) space at the top of page 4 of my document. The space shows up in print preview, but not in the document. The last line on page 3 is 207 and the first line on page 4 is 208. How do I fix this?

13. PS – I have Excel 2003 …

14. How to work for automation of excel and power point presentaion?Please suggest

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