Re: Excel to Works

From: Harlan Grove (hrlngrv_at_aol.com)
Date: 04/01/04 

Date: Thu, 01 Apr 2004 07:40:50 GMT

"Ken Wright" <ken.wright@NOSPAMntlworld.com> wrote...
>> no good reason to waste storage (not to mention money) on Works.
>
>other than that certain versions appear to be a valid media for
>upgrade pricing qualification for Office or Excel :-)
...

You mean if you lack a third cousin's step child to claim for the student
pricing option?

All things considered, I'd much prefer MSFT losing a large chunk of the
market to OpenOffice and StarOffice (even better, to Gnome Office) and be
forced to return to the 'competitive Upgrade' (read: predatory) pricing of
about a decade ago when owning any of the major spreadsheets qualified one
for upgrades to any other at about US$100.

That said, I don't use Excel for stats, so for me the improvements in its
stats functions are a big ho hum, ditto regression & simulation. At the
moment I use XL8/97 at work and XL9/2K at home, and I dread the scheduled
rollout of XL10/2002 at work later this year. Other than the quantum leap in
functionality provided by colored work*** tabs in XL10/2002, I can't think
of any compelling reason to upgrade from XL9/2K. So . . . if the OP can find
a cheap copy of Office 2000, that may well be the best of all options.

If Microsoft ever develops a spread*** that

1. has at least as many columns as there days in a leap year,

2. can have C:\foo\bar.xls and X:\Y\Z\bar.xls open in the same instance at
the same time,

3. learns from StarOffice/OpenOffice that DDE calls can be implemented with
the syntax of function calls rather than hardcoded DDE command expressions,

4. adds any dozen of the functions in Longre's MOREFUNC.XLL as built-in
work*** functions (aside from MDETERM.EXT and MINVERSE.EXT, for which
there's no excuse for such functionality not *ALREADY* being part of Excel),

5. extends the CELL function to return formatting information such as text
and background colors, which 123's @CELL has been able to do for over a
decade now,

6. either extends SUMIF/COUNTIF to handle multiple, nontrivial criteria and
arrays as well as ranges or implements a simple way to set up tables with
field names for use with SQL.REQUEST (gosh, maybe even think about rewriting
SQL.REQUEST in VBA rather than XLM, or even make it an XLL),

7. adds true regular expression support to Edit > Find/Replace, Data > Text
to Columns, FIND(), SEARCH(), MATCH(), {V|H}LOOKUP, DSUM etc. like
OpenOffice/StarOffice already provide,

8. DOCUMENTS what exactly the object returned by

OFFSET(Range,{0;1;2},{0,1},1,1)

is (and makes it possible to pass such beasts to and return them from udfs)
[this is a plea for better documentation in general, including correction of
long-standing errors in online help],

9. makes 3D references part of Excel's object model so that they can also be
passed to and returned from UDFs.

I could go on, but these are what I'd consider a minimal list of new
features that'd make for a compelling upgrade. Until all governments east of
the Urals and south of the Yucatan peninsula and the Mediterranean Sea adopt
OpenOffice or StarOffice for use on all of their PCs, I doubt MSFT would get
off their collective, monopolistic butts to tackle any of the items above
(except, perhaps, for #8, which doesn't actually require any coding work,
but does assume someone there knows what this mysterious type really is).
I'd bet blinking text is added to Excel before any of the 9 items above.

To be fair, I'm not an ideal Office customer. I don't use Word or PowerPoint
if I can help it. When I do use them, it's usually to open documents and
print them to .PDF files so I can then delete the .DOC and .PPT files. The
company I work for uses Lotus Notes, so I'm blessed by having no contact
with Outlook, Exchange etc. I use Excel and Access as analytical tools, I
create as few 'documents' as possible. SmartTags and Task Pains strike me as
Clippy's Revenge.