Migration after 3 years?

As we approach 2010...

Has everyone finally made the transition to Office 2007?

...or does a large majority of the business world still despises the ribbon enough to resist the urge?

Re: Migration after 3 years?

I'm at least beginning to make some effort...

My company has not adopted it yet, although I'm told they have begun some "pilot programs". Amazing to me, 3 years and we're just now starting pilot programs. Amazing in the sense that it shows just how bad the UI is.

I now have an installation of Office 2007 on a seperate laptop in my office. After a week of toil, I've managed to rebuild (almost) the entire Excel 2003 Classic Menu as a tab in the ribbon. Not sure if I should bother to make it available to folks as an addin or if it's old-hack at this point.

Re: Migration after 3 years?

Quote from florachristi

2007 package is advance of 2003 its nice to use and makes very easy to work also,,,,,,

You can't even edit a formula and use the scroll wheel. If you haven't noticed that, then:

1) You still have the redundant "Edit Directly in Cell Option" checked.

2) You don't do much edit/auditing of formulas.

What's bad about 2007...

Generally, the more advanced the user, the more they hate the Excel 2007 UI.

There are zero options for intermediate users to quickly create custom toolbars. This one doesn't bother me so much because I know how to manipulate the complex code required to add my own toolbar features (a complicated dance between VBA and XML that will baffle the majority of users). I've alredy seen that this has been improved upon a bit with Office 2010. Perhaps they'll also add/allow additional ribbon docking on the right-left-bottom-float of the work area.

There are significant holes in the code/design that still will aggrevate even the most advanced developers (calling custom png button images at runtime for instance).

Certain time-saving features (like dragging ranges onto charts to add new series) have been removed.

I'm hopeful that in Office 2010 they'll at least fix the formula edit scroll wheel problem.

So what's actually improved?

They added five new formulas and made the Analysis Toolpack part of the standard native functions. Out of the 5 new functions, only 1 of them is of any real interest (IFERROR) and addresses one of my previous Excel pet peeves. I was happy to see it included.

They got rid of the retarded paperclip (nuf said).

They increased the number of cells; although this one is debatable as an actual improvement since certain VBA properties were not designed to return cell counts in the range of doubles so they had to add new CountLarge methods to handle the bloated cell counts of worksheet objects.

Support for dual processor calculations... I think this is an improvement, but haven't actually done any testing on the calc-speed having it enabled-disabled.

The Name Manager was improved (at least somewhat). You can delete more than one name at a time. Workbook names that are hidden are still just like viruses since there is still no way for the intermediate user to review the hidden names that are lurking within worksheets (or delete them). I still have to use my own Name Manager add-in to really control the viral hidden workbook names.

On the one hand, the ribbon is flexible enough that you can actually recreate a familiar Excel 2003 interface in the ribbon environment as a custom tab (although you do really have to be amongst the Excel power user ranks to figure it out). On the other hand, why didn't MS just include a Classic ribbon tab so I didn't have to waste two weeks of my life re-building it? They still offer Lotus 1-2-3 transition keys, but nothing for the Excel 2003 users?

Re: Migration after 3 years?

Quote from Dave Hawley

My pet peeve is the number of rows M$ supplies. Heck, if you need 1/4 of the total rows you are using the wrong tool for the job.

I've got a few workbooks with sheets that have maybe 8k rows of monthly data. Of course, then I have to consolidate the monthly data to annual with a few dozen sumif/sumproduct type formulas and that causes like a 30 second recalc delay between button pushes.

Can't imagine even coming close to actually using the 65k rows the previous incarnation allowed... I can only say that it is logical in a spreadsheet app to have more than 365 columns. I think double the 256 cols and a quarter of the 65536 rows would've been perfectly fine for a spreadsheet app.

Of course, we can't blame it all on Excel... they were just stealing... um... I mean... allowing compatibility, to predecessor apps.