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3.5 Smileys - 1 Smiley Poor, 5 Smileys Excellent
Platforms: Mac OS
Forward People use Excel
for many different reasons. I used it to create charts for my labs in
college and now I keep records of my Diablo 2 characters. When I was working
in an office, I used it track magazine subscriptions and update the budget.
As you can see, there are many ways to use a spreadsheet besides simply
keeping track of numbers. Microsoft has finally recognized this and updated
Excel with features that will better adapt to the users instead of the
other way around. Has Microsoft succeeded? Let's find out...
Lists Aren't Just for Checking Anymore
The biggest improvement to Excel 2001 is how it creates and manages lists. What is a list? According to Excel, a list "can be a series of worksheet rows that contain related data, such as an invoice database or a set of client names and phone numbers. A list can be used as a database, in which rows are records and columns are fields. The first row of the list has labels for the columns." Some of the ways you can use lists are for catalogs of books or CDs, inventories, grocery lists, a list of contacts, and much more. An example of a list is seen in the above right screenshot. You can see one of the lists that I use and a pop-up menu that shows some of the benefits that a list provides. This particular list keeps track of all of the skills that my sorceress in Diablo 2 currently has (just in case you were curious). Each column in the first row (list header) has a pop-up menu that you use to perform common activities such as sorting, showing only part of the list, applying a custom filter, and inserting a value that already appears in the column. Another benefit that lists provide is in keeping the list headers at the top of the spreadsheet when you scroll down or when you print it so you'll never have to keep track of what kind of data each column has. Let's say that you're keeping track of your magazine subscriptions and you want to add up how much money you're spending each year. All you have to do is click in an empty row, click on the Total Row button in the List Manager, and then you then have access to common math functions (sum, average, count, min, max) via a pop-up menu. Just select sum and the column is instantly added and a total given. Sure, you can do this a few other ways but this is the easiest way; especially for those who don't want to bother to learn how to write functions.
Most of the control over lists comes from the List Manager which is really
just a toolbar. It's not necessary to use the List Manager but since it
combines all of the commands in one location, it's very handy. In the
List Manager you can navigate around the list, insert and delete rows
and columns, format the list, and much more. In addition to the List Manager,
you can use all of the other commands that you would use with other data
such as making a chart, applying formatting from the Format menu, functions,
borders and shading, and so forth.
A Calculator Within A Calculator
Excel has very many powerful functions in statistics, finances, databases,
logic, math, and much more. For those who are not mathematically skilled,
these functions can be overwhelming. To flatten the learning curve, Excel
2001 introduces a Calculator. I clicked on the If
button to show you how the Calculator gently introduces you to the concept
of functions. All you have to do is fill in the blanks and click on Insert
to place the resulting function, =IF(A1<=4,"You
Failed!","You Passed!"), in the cell of your choosing. When you
click on the More button you're taken to the
same dialog box as if you had used the Insert Function command. If you
select one of the functions, you're taken from the Calculator completely.
Basically, the Calculator is only useful if you want to enter a simple
mathematical function, an if-then function, or a summation of a row or
column. I can see how it would be a neat feature to someone starting out
but I estimate that many people will find it easier to just bypass the
Calculator completely.
Automation
Many of my teachers in college posted our grades on their web site using
Excel so I'm sure they would have liked the ability to automate the process.
As you can see in the screenshot, you can decide when Excel will save
the spreadsheet or the workbook as a web sheet. This frees up having to
remember to constantly save as a web page and adjust the settings over
and over again. Unfortunately, there is no way to automate the uploading
of the resulting web page to an ftp server so you have to remember to
do that yourself. That or write an AppleScript to do it for you so it
would be nice if Excel could do it without having to figure out a programming
language.
Other Improvements There a bunch of other new features of note including support for the new Euro symbol and currency values. There are even a bunch of spreadsheet templates included that make it easy for you to move back and forth between European currencies. You can also import data from FileMaker Pro version 3.0 and higher into Excel worksheets. You can select which of the database records to import and then use Excel to manipulate the data (such as changing the data to a list, making a chart, filtering the data, etc.). If you change the data in the database, you can refresh the data inside Excel to reflect them. The charts have been updated to include data labels, multilevel category axis, time-scale labeling, and user-definable value axis units. There's a new toolbar to make borders around cells that works a bit like how you make tables in Word. This makes it easier to add borders in Excel. The keyboard shortcuts in Excel have usually been different from those
of Word for even the most basic of tasks. This made it necessary to learn
a new set of shortcuts or rely on the menus thus giving up the speed that
keyboard shortcuts provide. Finally, Excel 2001 has the same shortcuts
as Word such as command-b to make text bold, command-i for italic text,
and command-u for underline. Some would say that this is a no-brainer
but considering that Excel was designed with numbers and not lists in
mind, it makes sense that text formatting would not be a priority for
the limited keyboard shortcuts available.
Conclusion These updates are aimed at how most people use Excel and bring much functionality to the lists that most people have typically used spreadsheets for. Add in the automating of saving these spreadsheets as web pages and it becomes easier than ever to publish your data on the Internet for your family or coworkers to see. However, these changes are rather underwhelming and if you don't have a need for lists, importing FileMaker databases, and the chart upgrades then there is little else that is new. I leave it to you to decide whether these additions make it worth it to you to upgrade.
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