Comments on: Shocking Revelation: Excel 2007 is Useless

By: Jason

Jason — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 17:15:38 +0000

Ridiculous, Excel 2007 is driving me out of my mind. Here is functionality that would solve 90% of my (known) problems with it — how about an option to turn off the $@!*#&^ automatic date formatting? If it’s possible, I sure can’t find it. If I type or replace text with 1-1/2 don’t assume I mean 1/1/2002! Typing ‘ before each entry isn’t always an option and it doesn’t hold formatting on replacing data. Dealing with automatic data formatting in this is like it was dealing with unordered lists in Word 2003, an exercise in madness. Office 2010. Riiiight.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 05 Jan 2010 19:57:08 +0000

I agree. Excel 2007 is not only useless it’s a case of consumer fraud. Wasting more time than it returns in useful productivity. I am so fed up with Microsoft I recently bought an i-Mac and am loving it. For the rest of my life I will have nothing more to do with Microsoft except what I have to use at work. Vista is useless too. Will not buy Windows 7. Microsoft should look at the enthusiasm of all the kids in an Apple store and realise the game is up with the next generation. Windows is dead! Fortunately I too have an old copyt of Excel 2003 and will never use anything else.

By: Don Ropp

Don Ropp — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 20:23:54 +0000

I was a heavy user of Excel 2003 and have about 6 months or so with Excel 2007 and still HATE IT! I can get around okay for most functionality, but the chart features are abosolutely worthless in 2007. It is not allowing me to resize the plot area today and the “help” function has nothing on this (That is what brought me to this post). The plot area “snaps” to the chart area when I try to reduce the plot area or move it. How could they have messed up something as basic as this.

By: Mike

Mike — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:59:59 +0000

Come back Excel 2003 -all is forgiven…….

I hate to agree but Excel 2007 is not a step forward….it may have a new “coat” of paint but underneath many things are broken. I have been doing VBA in numerous Excel versions 97,2002,2003….and this is the first time I have found it a such a painful new release of Excel.

(1) Pivot-table locking up and freezing when making chages to column, row or page field selections…….just never comes back – has to be killed from Processes.
(Use the same pivot-table/file in Excel 2003 it works a dream)

(2) Simple Conditional formating rules broken when using with Pivot-tables in Excel 2007. (Again works in Excel 2003)

(3) Reference to chart objects in Excel 2007 under VBA has changed yet again – and still working out how to fix some bugs in routines.

Oooooooohhh I so love Excel 2003……just just works all the time, everytime.

By: John

John — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:07:00 +0000

I haven’t read through all the comments
I found this website while trying to set up a chart in Excel
I have the chart exactly how the data needs to be displayed EXCEPT
I want to flip it sideways so that it will fit properly on the screen
Microsoft fails to provide any (intuitive) option to do this and to me that’s
completely pathetic especially since it’s such a basic necessity to charts.
Microsoft has earned no money for their horrific software in my opinion.

By: Jon Peltier

Jon Peltier — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 01:54:01 +0000

Wil -

All you have to do is enter your old favorite shortcut combinations, and Excel 2007 will honor them. Alt-T-I opens the Add-Ins dialog, for example.

By: Wil

Wil — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 00:01:59 +0000

I’m mute in 2007. I’m an advance Excel keyboard user rather than a point and click. Over the years I can simply hit the Alt key and first letter of the menu – most time without thinking. Typing is much more efficient than point and click.

2007 didn’t retain the same menu layout, forcing me to learn new keyboard commands. I think the ribbon will cause me to use the mouse more.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 17:25:22 +0000

The ribbon is probably good for some people, but for many common tasks that I do, there are 7 clicks of the mouse rather than the 1 click or 2 keys presses that I used to do. Very annoying!

By: WS

WS — Thu, 16 Jul 2009 18:19:46 +0000

This is an AWFUL piece of software. Its 2009 and this hunk has still so many bugs in it its amazing. What really sucks is that apart from the charts and some of the formatting changes its the old 03 coding behind the facia!!

I HATE IT

By: CantBelieveIt

CantBelieveIt — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:40:25 +0000

Wessel “I have one other MAJOR gripe: the performance / speed. I have a single-core PC running XP Pro with 1 GB RAM. If you have several charts with many data points on them, and make a change to any of the data values, Excel takes AGES to update the charts, while it becomes completely unresopnsive. The same charts in Excel 2003 would update almost instantaneous.”

Totally agree Wessel, and that is how I found this site! I’ve found the only workaround is to click SAVE after you have made a change, for some reason it then shows the changes you have made. To me this is a basic requirement of WYSIWYG funcitionality and it is nothing short of ASTOUNDING that Mr Gates has missed it with Charts in Excel2007, despite all the earlier versions doing this stuff perfectly well.