Excel 2007 is useless. This was a shocking revelation when I tried to create the charts for last post (Chart Design: Abortion Ratios 1980-2003).
It was my first serious attempt at using Excel 2007. I failed miserably and gave up. I had to do everything in Excel 2003 and then open the file in Excel 2007 for some polishing.
I new there was some senseless options in conditional formatting (actually, it is worse than I expected, as you can see on the left chart). And Stephen Few said everything I needed to know about Excel 2007 new chart engine. And, by that time, Microsoft bought Dundas. Isn’t that enough to raise some red flags?
But I had to see it for myself. I will not talk about the ribbon. I keep it hidden, so it really doesn’t bother me. And having to learn a new interface is something that I don’t mind – let’s call it brain workout.
There are several small but frustrating things, like trying to select multiple charts as objects, but what really pissed me off was that empty macro I got, after recording some chart formatting. I couldn’t believe it and tried several times, before googling for this “error”. It isn’t one (you can compare both versions here and get more bad news, as I did).
I suspect that this is just the tip of the iceberg. And it is not the major changes in features or the new user interface. It is the small things, left behind just to annoy you.
Bottom line: stay with Excel 2003. Charts in Excel 2007 look much better due to the new rendering engine, but do you really want to buy Office 2007 just to polish some charts?
Please share your thoughts in the comments. I’d like to know if (and how) you can do productive work with Excel 2007.
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Over the years we’ve thought of Excel as the powerhouse for business… until Excel 2007. By this time 2010 we would have thought that all these Excel weaknesses would have been corrected in service pack updates. How long does it take…. re-inventing the wheel again? Did they throw the baby out with the bathwater when they developed Excel 2007?
First, being a business user, we don’t think Excel 2007 was made for business users, it was made for high schoolers. Large, colorful, fancy icons in the ribbon; pretty charts (it’s all about fluff, just like memory intensive Aero); and a menu system driven for first time users. If you are an intermediate Excel user (written some macros, worked with databases, used logic formulas, nested formulas, made drawings, made combination charts, automated tasks with the click of a macro-assigned icon, used lookup tables, prepared reports and summaries for management w/in a day) then I think Excel 07 is a big step backward.
Before, we could apply formats to an entire chart, then shift-click select, then press F4 and format 6 other charts, just like that! We could format cells in a handful of ways, then use F4 to format many other cells in ALL the same ways…. but not with 2007; we can only format the LAST command; there’s nothing productive about that.
-We could write a specific macro to maximize a chart to screen size, then click to reduce it to its place w/in the spreadsheet, but not 2007.
-Any macro recorded on a chart now yields a blank macro, a start/end and no middle… and Excel doesn’t tell us we can no longer write macros on charts. There’s nothing productive about that.
-We used to double-click the x-axis to bring up the format screen, now we have to hover and catch the right ‘place’. MS didn’t do us any favors in 2007 which increased productivity.
For productivity, All our menus were customized with top commands moved up, and lesser commands moved to the bottom; custom toolbars allowed quick clicks for tasks. In Excel 2007 we’ve maximized use of the customized QuikAccessToolbar with every command we could get on it [that helps-- use All Commands when setting up].
Excel 2007 reminds me of ‘Excel 95′, very buggy; lock-up and crash, or hit a button and wait; it took a few years to work thru all that. Now, we’re back.
-Excel 2007 is a memory hog, often using 100% resources and slowing down ( we upgraded to 3gig- —still not enough ram).
-When saving large DB’s (3 different ones), Excel often says ‘ cannot shift objects off of screen’ — never saw that one before –; tried deleting rows and columns at each end of DB, but that made no difference.
-Also, it’s not fun to have to click thru 4-5 menu items to get a command when it used to be 1-2 clicks. Why are things buried? That’s ergonomically bad.
-Why are things layered thru menus, and then the menus…. – looks like some were just quickly added to some spreadsheet layout w/o order. What was wrong with the tab structure in Excel 2003– too fast for the user?
TIP#1: If you want to insert cells, don’t go to the insert menu, go to the home menu. The home menu is actually a format menu [Home=Format].
TIP#2: Right click on things more often, sometimes you can get the old 2003 tabbed menu up quickly.
TIP#3: For charts embedded in a worksheet, scroll chart cell to top left corner of worksheet, use 175% custom zoom to make the chart large, then zoom back to 100% when done modifying (no chart window anymore).
-And what is it with the color themes? All our colors were already developed; remember, we could design our own color pallettes. Nothing wrong with themes, but they should be a sublevel option. Who asked for them?
-And Excel drawing– why do the drawing lines appear to have fuzz around them; why are there big cicles at the connectors, which interfer with the visual perception of the drawing being made. One spreadsheet of 300 drawings took 10-15 minutes to save, even though it never took more than 2 minutes before. That is not productivity and that is not good for business.
-Many of our already developed charts have had to have some re-formatting done: labels, text boxes, axis, font sizes, etc. Things like shapes and charts can move during ‘save’; then we have to page up/down to get the normal display back. Microsoft, why why why. Where’s our Excel?
It’s like the intention, again, was for high schoolers, the newbies to Office, and damn the businesses which had driven Excel’s improvements for years. For certainly, Excel 2007 cuts productivity by 1/4 to 1/3 with its ‘glitches’. It’s probable that MS hurried Office to market even though they knew Excel was ‘not business ready’. That’s why many businesses are hanging on to Office 03 XP, Excel’s productivity losses.
One of the comments made early on about the ribbon was that MS programmers felt people were not seeing all the possibilities built into Excel, which were in the sub-menus. Well, how did this ribbon menu improve that; we’d like to know? The sad part is that Bill Gates wanted the classic menus left in as an option but the programmers talked him out of it. … Sad.
[Other things in Office 2007 weren't ready either: Word no longer has an insert Page X of Y function for headers/footers ie., "page 4 of 55"; PowerPoint has macros and the visual basic editor but NO macro recorder.....]
All we want to do is be able to resize and format our charts. We’ve looked all over the net, can’t do it; no solution appears. A macro, a code, an add-in… Oh, ok, maybe Office 2010 will fix it it. Or not. Maybe we should move to ‘open ofiice’. Or maybe Microsoft could make a free ADD-IN that would fix the chart problems. That would be nice.
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