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Greetings!
With the debut of Excel 2007 and its migration into
mainstream and eventually, Corporate America and
Wall Street workstations, we decided to give it a test
and report to you our thoughts on Microsoft's
progress (or rather, lack thereof).
Similar to our assessment of Windows Vista, we feel
that we should be hired by Microsoft because
apparently their business analysts, software
developers and designers are obviously on
completely different wavelengths than its user base.
To spare you the agonizing torture of our displeasure
with Vista and Excel 2007, here is our summary
thoughts:
Don't upgrade or hold off on upgrading to
Excel 2007 as long as possible (ditto for Vista)
Sure, in another year, Vista and 2007 will be the
standard, then you'll have no choice
It is clear that Excel 2007 is made for the
masses and not Wall Street => toolbars and the
relatively flexibility in customizing them are gone,
replaced with uncustomizable "ribbons"
Old Excel 2003 shortcut keys, while they still work,
are gone => we envision a world in which old-school,
hard core Excel users will know a bunch of shortcuts
that the newer generation will have no clue how to
use
It is mind boggling why the ribbon on top takes up
so much space (even though you can hide it),
especially in this new era of widescreen laptops, it
totally reduces the amount of workable space and the
ribbon should be docked to the right
Okay, enough griping. What is good about Excel
2007? So far we can't tell, but there are two things
that's good:
Conditional formatting is now limited to 50 (?)
instead of 3 conditions
Instead of 65,536 rows x 256 columns, you now
have 1,048,576 rows x 16,384 columns (2^14 and
2^20). We like this since you don't have to migrate to
Access for large data dumps, although it dramatically
slows down the system
In our humble, non-important opinion (in the eyes of
Microsoft), despite our (self-proclaimed) mastery of
Excel, we will continue the hopeless fight against
Excel 2007 until we have no choice when most of
our corporate clients eventually adopt it. Thus, in
partial embrace to this losing battle, we have
assembled a list of Excel 2007 menu shortcuts
which you can download at: WST Free
Resources
For more information on the major
differences
between Excel 2003 and the dark-side, Excel 2007,
visit this link: http://www.add-ins.com/Excel%202003%
20versus%202007.htm
Finally, in some shameless self-advertising,
all of our courses,
including follow-on advanced content, are
also available online in our video-based, self-study
platform which replicates the live learning
environment including side-by-side Excel
modeling building and much more! Visit
www.wstselfstudy.com - just for receiving this
email you can enter in discount code:
fightexcel2007 for
15% off your
entire shopping cart! You or your friends/colleagues
can use this code as many times until the end of
August.
Thank you very much!
Sincerely,
Hamilton Lin, CFA
Wall St. Training
President
Office: (212) 537-6631
Fax: (212) 656-1221
www.wallst-training.com
www.wstselfstudy.com
Wall St. Training is a registered servicemark of HL
Capital Partners, Ltd.
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