Testers Wanted-Feel good about yourself and volunteer today!

[dk]

Hello everyone and Happy New Year! Here in Oz the party is long over and we have the hangovers to prove it

Anyway, I've written an add-in for Excel that I'd like to get some feedback and testing on. I've written it using Excel 2003 but would like to get it tested on as many different versions as possible.

The add-in allows you to maintain a Favourites list in Excel, much like the Favorites in Internet Explorer. You can save favourite folders and files and quickly access them by either clicking File, Favourites or right-clicking in a worksheet and choosing the Favourites menu item. I wrote this for work as I was fed up with constantly navigating from something like G:\004Accounting\Transport\Tran_acc\XLFILES\Planning and Budgeting\Elle\Northern Region and back to H:\Development\Elle and then off somewhere else.

I know some of you may be thinking that Excel already provides this functionality with the Add to Favorites option in the Open dialog box but it seems to have disappeared in Office 2003 (haven't fully investigated). Also, I prefer to keep my favourites as websites, not clog it up with file favourites.

Anyway, you can download the file from here. Any feedback can be posted here or sent to dan@danielklann.com.

This is not a commercial project, just something that I'd like to get tested. Hopefully some of you may find it useful.

Thanks,
Dan

 

[gaynard_nelson]

Re: Testers Wanted-Feel good about yourself and volunteer to

Thanks for the replies everyone. I will post a more detailed response later but for now I'd like to address Gaynard's issue...

Thanks Gaynard for pointing this out. This issue definitely needs to be resolved. How about getting rid of the constants for 'Favourites' or 'Favorites' and just have the add-in detect if the regional settings are set to USA? If so, it will be spelt 'Favorites' and 'Organize', otherwise it will have the correct spelling ( ). Would this be acceptable or should I keep it as it is so that non-English users can change it to whatever they want in their language and find an alternative way of fixing this?

Any thoughts?

Thanks for your reply. I would keep it as simple as possible. Maybe a cautionary note associated with the section on changing the spelling. That would have been all I needed.

 

[dk]

Re: Testers Wanted-Feel good about yourself and volunteer to

Thanks to everyone for your replies.

<ul>
[*]Re the position of the Favourites on the File menu - I will leave it as it is just for now but soon add a simple Options dialog that will allow you to specify exactly where you want the item to appear, if at all.
[*]Until a cleaner solution is found I will leave the 'language' option as it is, but add the cautionary note and 'fix' code to the readme.txt, as per Gaynard's post. Dennis has hit the nail on the head - I'm worrying about getting something right that most people won't care about.
[*]Ken - your first request is easy to add, and I will do. Your second point is something I'm aware of and I'll fix in the near future. Ta!
[*]I think LASW10 posted something about allowing file types other than XLS to be added. You will be able to choose either Excel Files (*.xl*, Text files (*.prn, *.txt, *.csv) or All Files (*.*)
[/list]

I think that the add-in has received some good testing thanks to some very helpful people here and I should be able to put a version 1 up during the weekend.

Cheers,
Dan

 

[TryingToLearn]

Re: Testers Wanted-Feel good about yourself and volunteer to

Dan:

I also think this is GREAT!

Much easier than all the icons I have created for the custom toolbar.

The only change I would suggest is that when opening a file via this add-in that it be added to the MRU list. As a keyboard vs mouse proponent, it provides even quicker access to the file I just closed and remembered I needed one more thing from.

Looking forward to the "official" release and thank you for the work in doing this!