Category: Excel Archive

I’m the technical reviewer for Pro Excel Financial Modeling: Building Models for Technology Startups, by Tom Sawyer, which will be published in April 2009.

Here’s how Tom describes the book:

“This is a great opportunity for me to summarize and share fifteen years of experience helping startup and early stage companies move from concept to operational status. The book combines important business concepts and practices with practical ‘how to’ information on financial modeling and analysis.”

Apress Alpha Book Program

Some chapters of the book are already available for purchase through the Alpha Books program at Apress.

In the Alpha Books program, you get immediate access to chapters of the book, as they’re being written and reviewed. You can provide feedback to the author, and help improve the final product.

Get 4 Chapters

There are four chapters available for download now, and more chapters will be added to the download as work progresses.

If you buy the Alpha Book, you’ll be notified when new material is ready.

Then, go back to the Apress site and download it.
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The UK Excel User Group is holding a free conference at Microsoft London in April 2009. It’s a bit too far for me, but if you can make it, I highly recommend that you register.

You’ll learn new things, meet some terrific people, and spend a couple of days discussing Excel. What could possibly be better than that?

The agenda includes sessions on charts, pivot tables, functions, names and many other topics. Even if you’re familiar with some of the topics, you’ll benefit from attending.

Excel Expert Presenters

The presenters are a very smart and creative bunch, and they’ll almost certainly show you a few tips and techniques that you haven’t tried before.

The Q&A sessions will be an excellent opportunity to discuss any Excel problems that you’ve encountered, and get solutions or suggestions from the presenters and other attendees.

When and Where

• Date: April 1-2, 2009
• Location: Microsoft London (Cardinal Place)
  • 100 Victoria Street
  • London SW1E 5JL
  • Tel: 0870 60 10 100

The agenda for the two days is outlined at the Excel User Group site and there’s also a Word document with conference details that you can download.

To book for either or both days, send an email to [email protected]

Tell them that Debra sent you, and you’ll get a 25% discount on the free admission! You can use Excel to figure out how much that is!  😉
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Have you switched from Excel 2003, with its compact toolbars, to Excel with its Ribbons commands?

If you’ve switched, did you find it easy to adjust to the new User Interface?

Classic Menu Add-in

I’ve heard lots of complaints about switching from those toolbars to the Excel Ribbon.

So, when I noticed an Excel add-in called, “Excel 2007 Ribbon to old Excel Classic Menu Toolbar” recently, I decided to download the trial version and take a look.

Transition to Excel Ribbon

Maybe this add-in would help people make an easier transition to Excel 2007. The add-in was at an introductory sale price of $8.99, so it wouldn’t be too big an investment.

The download went smoothly, and the installation took a bit longer than I expected, but nothing too serious.

Annoying Pop-up Window

However, immediately after the installation, a pop-up window appeared, asking me to send my name and email address, and subscribe to a newsletter.

I didn’t want the newsletter, and tried to close the window, but there’s no way to get rid of it.

The X button has no effect, and the Send button demands that you fill in the boxes.

Finally, I was able to close it with the Task Manager.

Uninstalling the Add-In

Because of that bad experience, I haven’t even tried the product and I’ve decided that I don’t want anything to do with this company.

I’ll be uninstalling the trial version in a couple of minutes.

By the way, the trial version only installs two of the old style menus (File and Edit).

If you want the rest of the menus, you’ll have to buy the full version.

I won’t be buying it, but maybe it’s something you’d like to try.

Loved Those Tiny Toolbars

This Excel Toolbar add-in did make me realize one thing though.

It’s not the drop-down menus I miss, it’s the space-saving toolbars, with their tiny rows of efficient little buttons.

Recently I helped someone who was having trouble entering data in a new installation of Excel 2007.

• When he entered 100, the value was automatically changed to 1.
• If he typed 1000, the value immediately became 10.

He found this very mysterious, and frustrating, as you can imagine.

It’s a Feature

What the user had discovered was a relatively unknown feature of Excel.

If you’re entering a long list of decimal amounts, you can turn on this feature, and the decimal points will be added automatically.

For example, if you’re entering hundreds of sales orders, where everything has two decimal places, it could save you hundreds of keystrokes.

However, this feature won’t be of help to anyone who’s entering a small amount of data. In fact, it will be the opposite of helpful!

How to Change the Setting

I have no idea how this setting would have been turned on in Excel 2007, without the user knowing.

It’s certainly not a default setting when you take Excel out of the box.

Perhaps it was changed accidentally, or by a co-worker who has a strange sense of humour.

Change Setting in Excel 2007

To turn on the automatic decimal point setting in Excel 2007, follow these steps:

• At the top left of the Excel window, click the Office button
• Next, click Excel Options
• At the left, click the Advanced category
• Next, in the Editing options section, remove the check mark from ‘Automatically insert a decimal point’
• Finally, click OK.

Change Setting in Excel 2003 or earlier:

To turn on the automatic decimal point setting in Excel 2003, or earlier versions, follow these steps:

• On the Tools menu, click Options
• On the Edit tab, remove the check mark from Fixed decimal
• Finally, click the OK button, to close the Options window