Chaos

It was chaos in 1997 when Excel 97 introduced a new file format. Back then, there were three file types:
Excel 95 file type
Excel 97 file type
Hybrid which included both Excel 95 & Excel 97 together.
All three file types had an .xls extension.

In 2007, the new file types can be .xlsx, .xlsb, .xlsm. Immediately, the person with Excel 2003 knows that they have something that they can not deal with.

Just this morning, one of my clients (who are not upgrading), sent me a panic e-mail with a .xlsx attachment that they had received from a customer. The manager told the person to drive to Kinkos where the rental computers would have the new version of Excel. Since I have both versions here, I opened it and converted it for them. This “deer in the headlights” reaction is typical, though. There are two things that could have prevented it:
a) The recipient could have downloaded the free utility to open .xlsx files, although apparently they had no clue that it existed.
b) The sender could have saved the file as an .xls file from within Excel 2007. Although, in this case, I am sure the customer assumed that (1) The customer is always right, and (2) it is not their problem that the vendor is not as technologically advanced as the customer and hasn’t upgraded yet.

I wonder if the people with Excel 2007 have a technology chip on their shoulder and don’t want to save as Excel 2003 files just to show off that they are brave enough to upgrade? Certainly, if it a service provider is sending a file to his customers, he owes it to them to offer the file in either .xls or .xlsx versions. However, if it is the customer sending the file to a vendor, I can see where the reaction of “you should be able to deal with this” would creep in.

Of course, none of these options are relevant for the person with more than 256 columns or > 65,536 rows. The free converter will truncate the extra columns or rows. In this case, the sender is going to have to do a bit of a sell job. “Look, you would benefit from having the new Excel – you will be able to get the entire model on one worksheet, greatly improving the charts and analysis. Run over to the office supply store and buy the Home edition for 125 bucks just to get these extra rows. It is well worth it.”

By the way, customers say they won’t upgrade because they fear the loss of the menu and toolbars. Two great products now deal with this:
http://www.mrexcel.com/classicexcelmenu.html

Find New Books with Shelfari

If you love books, there is a fantastic new site called Shelfari. It is still in beta, but seems to be working well.

To start, you sign up for a free account at Shelfari. You then add your favorite books to your bookshelf. You can either search by title, author, isbn, or, if you are seriously into books, you can upload a text file of ISBN's. I suggest putting 10 or more favorite books on your bookshelf.

That is when the power of Shelfari starts to take over. There is a link on your bookshelf to go to your Shelfari Home page. On that page, Shelfari will list other members who have the same titles on their bookshelves. For example, I learned that a member named dahveedgr had 7 books in common with me. I click on that member's name and I can now browse his bookshelf. Shelfari arranges my view of his bookshelf so that our books in common are at the top. When I see which books we share, I can tell that this member likes books about design and it is interesting to browse through his bookshelf to see if there are any new design books that I might want to add to my collection. This is a brilliant way to find new books that might be interesting to you. If you see on that you like, click it and add it to your wishlist.

For the most part, the Shelfari interface is fairly straightforward. When you click on a title on your bookshelf, a web 2.0 control pops up listing a few things you can do with the title. The details page for the title is buried under the More menu item, which is my only frustration point with the service. If you are concerned about privacy, sign up with a screen name instead of your real name.

If you are going to dive in and list many books, you can tag each book with keywords. The keywords appear at the bottom of your bookshelf so that you can filter to just the books on Excel or just the books on typography.

I set up a reading group for people interested in Charting, although I am not quite sure how I am supposed to get other people to join. There is also a "friends" page, where you can add others will similar books to your friends list. Give Shelfari a try. If you add your favorite Excel & computer books to your bookshelf, invite me as a friend - my userid is bjele - and we can get a great picture of which books are popular with the MrExcel readers.

Classic Excel Menus in Excel 2007

Excel 2007 is a fantastic new version of Excel, but the #1 complaint that I hear is people fear the learning curve with the new Ribbon interface.



Here is a company who has solved the problem. Their add-in is free to try, $15.99 to buy and brings back a great replica of the Excel 2003 menu bar, the standard toolbar, and the formatting toolbar. The classic menu shows up as a "Menu" tab on the Excel 2007 ribbon. You can control if this tab appears first or last.

If you were hesitant about upgrading to Excel 2007 because of the learning curve required, this add-in solves the problem!