25 yearsof Excel

[VoG]

http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-...software-that-changed-the-world-25-years-ago/

 

[Evagrius Ponticus]

Thanks for the article Peter - very interesting - I enjoyed the comments as well; some were hilarious

 

[ziad alsayed]

thansk VoG, interesting article.

 

[steve case]

Good read, thanks for posting.
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[Felix Atagong]

Excellent article, 25 years already, I'm really getting old! (I used to work with Excel on DOS a century ago.)

 

[Lewiy]

One thing that jumps out at me from that article (good link by the way!)<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o></o>
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For instance, he says, some of the options in the “Paste Special” function still seem obscure. “We did them because it seemed really cool that we could,”

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I wonder what he finds obscure about the Paste Special options? Perhaps “Column Widths” is a bit odd (although arguably useful if you ever remembered to use it!), but I think I could find a reasonable purpose for everything else!

 

[cornflakegirl]

Yeah, I wondered about that too. I think I've used everything except for Validation and Column Widths.

 

[SydneyGeek]

I've used Multiply but have yet to use Add...

Denis

 

[Lewiy]

I've used Multiply but have yet to use Add...

Denis

I can’t say I’ve actually used all of them in “real life”, but certainly Add is one that crops up now and again for converting text to numbers over a large range of data. And, in fact, you could use any of the operations for the same purpose.
<?xml:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-comfficeffice" /><o> </o>
I think, perhaps they could streamline it a bit more, e.g. what’s the point in having “Formulas and number formats” when you could have check boxes instead of radio buttons for selecting the parts of the data that you want. In all honesty, I have created a custom ribbon tab which covers all of the paste special items I use regularly as I find it annoying to have to go through the dialog window every time, but that’s not to say that the functions aren’t useful!!

 

[SydneyGeek]

I can’t say I’ve actually used all of them in “real life”, but certainly Add is one that crops up now and again for converting text to numbers over a large range of data. And, in fact, you could use any of the operations for the same purpose.

I use Multiply for converting text to numbers. One of those either / or settings I guess.
<o></o>

I think, perhaps they could streamline it a bit more, e.g. what’s the point in having “Formulas and number formats” when you could have check boxes instead of radio buttons for selecting the parts of the data that you want. In all honesty, I have created a custom ribbon tab which covers all of the paste special items I use regularly as I find it annoying to have to go through the dialog window every time, but that’s not to say that the functions aren’t useful!!

Yep, I know what you mean. I once tried to rewrite the charting wizard, but it turned out to be a much bigger job than I expected at the time.
Nothing wrong with trying to set up Excel as you want it

Denis