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Well, for me they ruined it somewhere in the transition from '03 to '07. Of course, my take on this is heavily skewed because I am more of an engineering user

Well, for me they ruined it somewhere in the transition from '03 to '07. Of course, my take on this is heavily skewed because I am more of an engineering user of these tools than a typical office worker. And, although I have used it extensively for such things as invoices, purchase orders, financial calculation, presentations and business documents I still think of these tools as part of my engineering tool set. Examples: I devoted about three months to write an Excel VBA tool to help automate the creation of components for the EDA package we were using at the time. Creating a component such as a 1000+ pin FPGA went from almost literally days to an hour or two after this tool was in place. Use Excel and the built-in Solver tool to find solutions for programming a clock synthesizer to output a given set of frequencies. Use Excel + external voltage, current and temperature sensors to log and analyze test data. Use Excel to easily produce and maintain lookup-table-driven state machine code in C, including all the callbacks for each state. Use Excel to produce CNC G-code to run a Haas VF3-SS milling machine to produce patterned holes and threads. Automate Powerpoint with VBA to simulate the control panel of a piece of equipment, complete with a small dot-matrix LCD display and functioning menu buttons. This was used to for training purposes when the actual piece of equipment was not available. Use Word and VBA to automate parsing of documents and extraction of data. Anyhow, just some examples that come to mind. I had to install '07 when we switched to a Vista 64 to be able to run FEA and other tools that would benefit from that platform. I remember going from being a "power user" to feeling like an utter idiot. The UI change was brutal and I am still not sure that it was an improvement. They also modified automation and put in all of the roadblocks that just made it painful to use. Office 2013? Nope. Thanks.

doktrin 14y ago
> Well, for me they ruined it somewhere in the transition from '03 to '07. > Of course, my take on this is heavily skewed because I am more of an engineering user of these tools than a typical office worker Agree to disagree. Excel 2007 was a radical improvement over it's 2003 counterpart from an engineering standpoint. The row limitation was increased almost 20 fold, from 65k to 1.5 million. Filters and pivot tables both became noticeably more responsive and performant. > I remember going from being a "power user" to feeling like an utter idiot. Most of Office 2007's failings were of a UX nature, beginning with the relatively infamous "ribbon". While this is a problem of a subjective nature, IME it wasn't a major sticking point.
danielbarla 14y ago
The UI change was pretty brutal, I guess you could think of it as a "breaking change". Many people complain about it to this day, and it's been what, 5 years now? Having said that, I've found the 2007 UI to be vastly superior to the older one, for most common tasks. On a reasonable screen (1900+ wide), the main ribbon contains a significant portion of the most used basic functions, reducing the amount of menu navigation and tab-switching. The rest of the tabs are pretty self explanatory (once you unlearn your Office 2003 lessons). E.g. most of the "page layout" functionality used to be hidden in some arb place in the depths of the file menu; it is now one click away. So yeah, while these types of conceptual breaking changes are irritating, as long as they really are for the better, I'm all for it.
test001only 14y ago
A bit off topic, but are you sure Excel was the right tool for communicating with instruments, power point for simulating instrument front panel etc? I think LabVIEW or any other appropriate tool with Excel used for data presentation would have been better.
- robomartin 14y ago
  Not sure it was the best, but they worked very well. Powerpoint with some automation code under the hood can be absolutely brilliant in a presentation. All of a sudden your presentation isn't just a bunch of slides but you have a real instrument's control panel come to life and be usable on slide 59 (or whatever).

doktrin 14y ago

> Well, for me they ruined it somewhere in the transition from '03 to '07. > Of course, my take on this is heavily skewed because I am more of an engineering user of these tools than a typical office worker Agree to disagree. Excel 2007 was a radical improvement over it's 2003 counterpart from an engineering standpoint. The row limitation was increased almost 20 fold, from 65k to 1.5 million. Filters and pivot tables both became noticeably more responsive and performant. > I remember going from being a "power user" to feeling like an utter idiot. Most of Office 2007's failings were of a UX nature, beginning with the relatively infamous "ribbon". While this is a problem of a subjective nature, IME it wasn't a major sticking point.

danielbarla 14y ago

The UI change was pretty brutal, I guess you could think of it as a "breaking change". Many people complain about it to this day, and it's been what, 5 years now? Having said that, I've found the 2007 UI to be vastly superior to the older one, for most common tasks. On a reasonable screen (1900+ wide), the main ribbon contains a significant portion of the most used basic functions, reducing the amount of menu navigation and tab-switching. The rest of the tabs are pretty self explanatory (once you unlearn your Office 2003 lessons). E.g. most of the "page layout" functionality used to be hidden in some arb place in the depths of the file menu; it is now one click away. So yeah, while these types of conceptual breaking changes are irritating, as long as they really are for the better, I'm all for it.

test001only 14y ago

A bit off topic, but are you sure Excel was the right tool for communicating with instruments, power point for simulating instrument front panel etc? I think LabVIEW or any other appropriate tool with Excel used for data presentation would have been better.

robomartin 14y ago
Not sure it was the best, but they worked very well. Powerpoint with some automation code under the hood can be absolutely brilliant in a presentation. All of a sudden your presentation isn't just a bunch of slides but you have a real instrument's control panel come to life and be usable on slide 59 (or whatever).