Excel User Voice
At the recent Excel Global Summit the Excel team were keen to explain how they have started using Excel User Voice to ask for and prioritise product improvement suggestions.
There are 2 important things to note about this:
- The Excel Dev Team actually read your suggestions on User Voice!
- Starting with Excel 2016 the development and ship cycle is much much faster than the traditional 3 years.
So it really is worthwhile making your suggestions to improve the product.
You get 10 votes on suggestions, and the suggestions are categorised by end-point and product area. So if you want to make a performance suggestion for Excel on Android phones you can focus down, see what other suggestions have been made in this area, and either cast a vote for an existing suggestion or make a new suggestion.
Workbook Calculate
To try this out I made a suggestion (about calculation of course).
At the moment from the UI you can either calculate all open workbooks (F9 or Automatic) or a worksheet (Shift F9).
From VBA you can also calculate a range (Range.Calculate and Range.CalculateRowMajorOrder).
But you cannot calculate a single workbook.
This is really annoying when you have 2 versions of a large slow workbook open, or you have a small rapidly changing workbook open that links to a large mostly static workbook.
My suggestion is to add an additional calculation setting: Calculate Active Workbook Only and from VBA Workbook.Calculate.
So please vote for my suggestion if you think it’s a good idea!
Thanks for posting this Charles.
Interesting that adding built-in support for Python was way ahead in the votes.
I was surprised that bringing back off-line VBA help had so few votes (but it has 1 more now, I might go back and give it my remaining 5).
Probably you can save your votes: You can download the VBA .chm file from here:
https://github.com/OfficeDev/VBA-content
@Charles
Broken link
@Andre
Works for me!
Never mind trivial stuff like calculation….how about giving “Speak on Enter” an accent based on regional settings. Including at the state level.
@Charles: good suggestion. Selecting all sheets and pressing shift+F9 might work from the keyboard but i guess there are situations where references between sheets mean this will not be sufficient for a full workbook recalc.
@Andre: see https://excel.uservoice.com/forums/304921-excel-for-windows-desktop-application the entry from Charles is further down.
The Sequence function suggestion of Brian Canes also deserves upvotes in my view (only 4 so far.) A function like seq(1,n) that returns an array of integers from 1 to n and which is not volatile and doesn’t depend on cell references would be very useful for formula constructions and vba programming.
Thanks Charles, but what I’m after is a return to context sensitive help for VBA (as in 2010 and earlier), rather than having to go into an external document and search for it. I had downloaded the chm file before, and found out how to make it display the content below the top level (which is still appearing blank in the file as downloaded), but I literally never use it. If I am going to have to do a search from an external document, I might as well search the entire contents of the Internet, rather than just one file.
Lori – I agree on the sequence function; I’ll go and add a vote.