Suggestions Please

re: Suggestions Please

Jean Martineau — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 01:52:02 GMT

Pivot table, Chart and the new Table concept are powerful ways to manipulate/organize data. I am interesting to hear about other new concepts that user would like to have or new concepts that Excel team have studied. For example, what about Animation or Creating a function from a pre-existing Excel formula.

re: Suggestions Please

Colin Banfield — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 20:02:03 GMT

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re: Suggestions Please

Francis — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 17:42:24 GMT

I would also like to hear about whether changes are being made to MS Query. Will its functionality be more directly integrated into Excel?

I need Excel's formulas/functions and 64k column limit but would like Access' ease-of-use and power in creating queries.

re: Suggestions Please

XL-Dennis — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 14:31:05 GMT

John,

Take a look at the following article which gives You the answer to Your speculations:

Isolating Office Extensions with the COM Shim Wizard

msdn.microsoft.com/.../default.asp

I leave it up to You to decide weather it trivial or not.

Kind regards,

Dennis

re: Suggestions Please

John Greenan — Wed, 14 Jun 2006 09:40:23 GMT

To Dennis Wallentin - I've worked with and/or written all of the above.

By shim you mean a PIA for the .net code to interoperate with COM don't you? That's generally trivial.

re: Suggestions Please

XL-Dennis — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 21:02:45 GMT

Sherry,

Stephen Bullen has developed an ActiveX control that host a VBA Userform. This control extend the Office CustomTaskpane object. The control is still under beta and hopefully it will be available when Excel 2007 hit the market.

I have had the pleasure to test it and it works excellent. I've made some solutions where I've added built-in controls to it, populate the controls with data from a SQL Server 2005 db.

Based on the user's selection data is then retrieved and added to the target sheet.

The control offer a flexible alternative to the present task pane and make it easier to work with data then the present IBF offer (Let see what PerformancePoint Server 2007 will be offering later this year).

Kind regards,

Dennis

re: Suggestions Please

XL-Dennis — Tue, 13 Jun 2006 19:38:26 GMT

Hi John,

If You ask MSFT then the only answer will be:

Managed COM add-in developed with C# (or at least VB.NET) where Ýou need do understand what shimming is. OK, you need also to realize that at present there exist no Shim wizard for C# 2005 (although it has been advertised it for some time now).

However, from a practical experience the best solutions would be the already existing once:

XLA developed by Excel (although You need to carefully investigate what is backward compatible or not)

XLL developed with C/C++ (for advanced and more powerful functions) and I hope Steve Dalton will update his book on the subject.

COM add-ins developed with classic VB.

On a personal level I can't say that I see the logical in creating managed COM Add-ins for an unmanaged enviroment.

Kind regards,

Dennis

re: Suggestions Please

Mark Chapman — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 21:04:14 GMT

I'd like to hear what bugs have been fixed in Excel 2007. It's difficult to commit to switching to the upgrade without knowing that the problems I have found and reported have been fixed.

re: Suggestions Please

John Greenan — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 09:22:09 GMT

A really simple thing - can the documentation show the complete list of command line switches in one place - in Excel 2002 I cannot see the /automation switch listed in the documentation anywhere, yet I use it on most days.

Also, what about a white paper or discussion about what is the preferred way to go for writing code to link into Excel - .xla, .xll, COM Addin or ???

re: Suggestions Please

Sherry — Sat, 10 Jun 2006 14:20:47 GMT

Here is my list. Number one on my list would have to be:

~ A new programmable task pane

And then the others in the order of importance are:

~ The Add-Ins tab

~ Your favourite feature most people never knew existed (audience participation night)

~ The Developer tab

~ The deprecated feature list

~ The UI for the add-ins that ship with Excel