Make a product that works

That isn't a minor bug Niek and nor is the crashing (and nor in fact are the
other 'bugs'). I am not developing a website with Excel nor trying to
develop a sophisticated inventory management system.

And I know the software well enough. Should I seek a consultant to help me:

Add a bunch of simple 4 field records to Excel
Indent as needed
Write a simple formula (check and return indent)

Are you saying that is beyond the scope or purpose of the software? Or that
someone with moderate Excel Skills shouldn't be able to do that without
paying someone?

I am not a VBA expert nor a formula expert though I have learned those as I
need them. That is not where i ran into problems though.

I shouldn't need a consultant to tell me that the Calculation Options in the
Formula Menu are not complete should I?

I couldn't use a consultant to keep Excel from crashing 10x a week could I?
Am I really pushing it's envelope that much with 50,000 records and a single
formula???

I did have a friend offer to write a macro to keep the Freeze Panes Frozen.
But isn't that an idiotic thing to need someone to write? Is it my lack of
knowledge, if Freeze Panes becomes unfrozen by the software INTENTIONALLY and
not because of bad coding, certainly the software should let you know at
least the first time yes ('Freeze Panes is disabled when it gets below 40
degrees" or some such)

Ditto Select All which often does not Select All. I have not made sense of
that but again, if that is an intentional design, it should be explained when
it first happens, as if i am selecting a 50,000 record sheet with 20 columns,
it is quite easy for me to miss the fact that Select All Selected Some and my
sort has now ruined my data. If it is a flaw it should be fixed as it is
major, if it is a matter of me 'not knowing the software well' then I put to
you that I shouldn't have to know the software well enough to figure THAT
out. How to use formulas, do complex manipulations, sure. But use Select
All???

Having spend 1000s of hours on this spreadsheet I can tell you that a good
20% of my time is spent dealing with these issues large and small. That is
not an issue of my not knowing it it is an issue of poor design. I get it
does a lot of fancy things well. But again, those are less then useful if
the underlying functions aren't attended to. Certainly the developers who
added 'Recalculate on Save' to the Excel Formula OPTIONS should have thought
to add it to the Formula Menu. You can't turn around and blame the user
because they didn't know you weren't standardinzing the functionality and
including it where it was most often and most obviously used and say 'Well
you should know that Manual Calculation is not fully implemented in the Menu;

Blaming me is a cop-out. Blaming the scope of my 'project' is as well. If
Excel is truly such a difficult program to gather and store simple records
with out formulas of functions, and you need a 'consultant' to do it,
something is truly Rotten in Denmark.

"Niek Otten" wrote:

I can understand that you're frustrated. Indeed there are a few problems
with Excel. But there are a few problems with every software product I know,
and often more than a few.

What I can't understand is that you invest so much time and rely completely
on a product that you apparently don't know very well. And that you use it
for something that you may expect it to do (and that may even be
documented), but what it certainly wasn't meant for primarily.

I agree with the advice to seek professional consultancy. "Top consulting
firms" would not be my first choice to look for it. Real Office expertise is
more often found with independent consultants or small companies. Quite a
few experts are regular posters in this group.

--
Kind regards,

Niek Otten
Microsoft MVP - Excel






"msnyc07" wrote in message
...
Recalculating cost me more then slowdowns it almost destroyed my work and
caused me weeks of work. A (or should I say Yet another) crash 'corrupted'
my
file and it 'fixed' it by removing all formatting. I was using Indenting
to
set up hierarchical tables and i had a formula column to derive that for
parsing into a DB. FORTUNATELY I had run that so even though the
formatting
was gone the indents had been derived. Except Excel recalculated the
Indents
using the zero'd out reformatting. So now I had a workbook with 100 sheets
and 50,000 records in various states of relations representing 1000s of
hours
of work which was useless.

Note that I *had* set Calculate Option in the Menu to Manual. After
paiunfully rebuilding the document with old versions that I had to audit
one
sheet by one sheet since the work has been on ongoing process I finally
put
the sheet back together with the right indent values.

So it turns out that Calculate Option in the Menu are not the *full*
options, that is that Manual means 'Manual Until You Save' and if you want
'Manual Even When You Save' you need to go into the Excel Preferences
where
they ALSO have a Calculate Options Menu but THIS one has an added
'Recalculate on Save' Toggle. Naturally if one saw that when setting
options
one would know that that needed to either be on or off based on
preferences;
it is a phenomenal oversight in development to not include that on the
Menu
as well; Manual looks like just what it should mean and without an option
for
Not on Save one would have no way of knowing that it was semi-manual yes?

So between the (yet another) crash and the poor design I lost weeks of
work
and gained the same in frustration.

BUT it wasn't over. I shut down the PC and restarted and opened the
spreadsheet and started working and then parsed it. Lo and behold, the
values
had been re-set to zero so the parse and the carefully reconstructed sheet
were useless. Why? Because Excel had re-set the Excel Options to
Automatic.
Why? Who Cares? So Manual in the Menu means 'Sort of until Excel decides
to
overide when you Save' and Manual in the Options means 'Sort of until
Excel
decides to overide when you re-start'

This is the tip of the iceberg in my frustrations and as I mentioned I had
a
friend at a consulting firm where they are whizzes with this sort of stuff
encounter the same frustration.

Will it be addressed in 2010? I don't know and I don't believe I'll be
testing it out.

Thank you for the reasonable reply though.

"JLatham" wrote:

Have you tried 2010 yet? If not, you might set up a system with it on it
and
give it a go. It would appear that many of the problems that were
admittedly
in 2007 have been addressed and corrected in 2010. Not saying that all
that
you've mentioned are working differently, but I think it's a better
product.

But other than the utter slowdowns I've experienced where it seems every
formula in a workbook was recalculated almost on a whim (not really, just
seemed that way), I haven't experienced the plethora of problems you
allude
to. But then I mostly stuck with 2003 anyhow.

"msnyc07" wrote:

Truly you should be ashamed of Excel. I couldn't even BEGIN to itemize
or
describe the utter hell of working with this application and the
literally
1000s of hours it has wasted of mine due to poor and sloppy
programming.
2007??? This is like a first release. From the ridiculous non-standard
cut/paste cache, to the on-again off-again 'select all' that destroys
sorts,
to the disappearing Freeze Top Pane, to the 'pervasive' recalculations
that
don't turn off no matter what you do and d RUIN work, to the DAILY
crashes
and the need to dig through pages of work and formulas to figure out
where
you left off. I'd expect this from an offshore coder I hired for $8
not
Microsoft. I am done. Here's a clue; fix the core components before
adding
new features. Because you are just building on a rotten foundation.

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click the
"I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button, follow
this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader and
then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...et.f unctions

I am responding purely on your excel setting the calculation to automatic.
Excel takes the option from the first workbook opened.
You could put a workbook_open macro to set calculation to MANUAL.

--
Don Guillett
Microsoft MVP Excel
SalesAid Software

"msnyc07" wrote in message
...
That isn't a minor bug Niek and nor is the crashing (and nor in fact are
the
other 'bugs'). I am not developing a website with Excel nor trying to
develop a sophisticated inventory management system.

And I know the software well enough. Should I seek a consultant to help
me:

Add a bunch of simple 4 field records to Excel
Indent as needed
Write a simple formula (check and return indent)

Are you saying that is beyond the scope or purpose of the software? Or
that
someone with moderate Excel Skills shouldn't be able to do that without
paying someone?

I am not a VBA expert nor a formula expert though I have learned those as
I
need them. That is not where i ran into problems though.

I shouldn't need a consultant to tell me that the Calculation Options in
the
Formula Menu are not complete should I?

I couldn't use a consultant to keep Excel from crashing 10x a week could
I?
Am I really pushing it's envelope that much with 50,000 records and a
single
formula???

I did have a friend offer to write a macro to keep the Freeze Panes
Frozen.
But isn't that an idiotic thing to need someone to write? Is it my lack
of
knowledge, if Freeze Panes becomes unfrozen by the software INTENTIONALLY
and
not because of bad coding, certainly the software should let you know at
least the first time yes ('Freeze Panes is disabled when it gets below 40
degrees" or some such)

Ditto Select All which often does not Select All. I have not made sense
of
that but again, if that is an intentional design, it should be explained
when
it first happens, as if i am selecting a 50,000 record sheet with 20
columns,
it is quite easy for me to miss the fact that Select All Selected Some and
my
sort has now ruined my data. If it is a flaw it should be fixed as it is
major, if it is a matter of me 'not knowing the software well' then I put
to
you that I shouldn't have to know the software well enough to figure THAT
out. How to use formulas, do complex manipulations, sure. But use Select
All???

Having spend 1000s of hours on this spreadsheet I can tell you that a good
20% of my time is spent dealing with these issues large and small. That
is
not an issue of my not knowing it it is an issue of poor design. I get it
does a lot of fancy things well. But again, those are less then useful if
the underlying functions aren't attended to. Certainly the developers who
added 'Recalculate on Save' to the Excel Formula OPTIONS should have
thought
to add it to the Formula Menu. You can't turn around and blame the user
because they didn't know you weren't standardinzing the functionality and
including it where it was most often and most obviously used and say 'Well
you should know that Manual Calculation is not fully implemented in the
Menu;

Blaming me is a cop-out. Blaming the scope of my 'project' is as well.
If
Excel is truly such a difficult program to gather and store simple records
with out formulas of functions, and you need a 'consultant' to do it,
something is truly Rotten in Denmark.

"Niek Otten" wrote:

I can understand that you're frustrated. Indeed there are a few problems
with Excel. But there are a few problems with every software product I
know,
and often more than a few.

What I can't understand is that you invest so much time and rely
completely
on a product that you apparently don't know very well. And that you use
it
for something that you may expect it to do (and that may even be
documented), but what it certainly wasn't meant for primarily.

I agree with the advice to seek professional consultancy. "Top consulting
firms" would not be my first choice to look for it. Real Office expertise
is
more often found with independent consultants or small companies. Quite a
few experts are regular posters in this group.

--
Kind regards,

Niek Otten
Microsoft MVP - Excel






"msnyc07" wrote in message
...
Recalculating cost me more then slowdowns it almost destroyed my work
and
caused me weeks of work. A (or should I say Yet another) crash
'corrupted'
my
file and it 'fixed' it by removing all formatting. I was using
Indenting
to
set up hierarchical tables and i had a formula column to derive that
for
parsing into a DB. FORTUNATELY I had run that so even though the
formatting
was gone the indents had been derived. Except Excel recalculated the
Indents
using the zero'd out reformatting. So now I had a workbook with 100
sheets
and 50,000 records in various states of relations representing 1000s of
hours
of work which was useless.

Note that I *had* set Calculate Option in the Menu to Manual. After
paiunfully rebuilding the document with old versions that I had to
audit
one
sheet by one sheet since the work has been on ongoing process I finally
put
the sheet back together with the right indent values.

So it turns out that Calculate Option in the Menu are not the *full*
options, that is that Manual means 'Manual Until You Save' and if you
want
'Manual Even When You Save' you need to go into the Excel Preferences
where
they ALSO have a Calculate Options Menu but THIS one has an added
'Recalculate on Save' Toggle. Naturally if one saw that when setting
options
one would know that that needed to either be on or off based on
preferences;
it is a phenomenal oversight in development to not include that on the
Menu
as well; Manual looks like just what it should mean and without an
option
for
Not on Save one would have no way of knowing that it was semi-manual
yes?

So between the (yet another) crash and the poor design I lost weeks of
work
and gained the same in frustration.

BUT it wasn't over. I shut down the PC and restarted and opened the
spreadsheet and started working and then parsed it. Lo and behold, the
values
had been re-set to zero so the parse and the carefully reconstructed
sheet
were useless. Why? Because Excel had re-set the Excel Options to
Automatic.
Why? Who Cares? So Manual in the Menu means 'Sort of until Excel
decides
to
overide when you Save' and Manual in the Options means 'Sort of until
Excel
decides to overide when you re-start'

This is the tip of the iceberg in my frustrations and as I mentioned I
had
a
friend at a consulting firm where they are whizzes with this sort of
stuff
encounter the same frustration.

Will it be addressed in 2010? I don't know and I don't believe I'll be
testing it out.

Thank you for the reasonable reply though.

"JLatham" wrote:

Have you tried 2010 yet? If not, you might set up a system with it on
it
and
give it a go. It would appear that many of the problems that were
admittedly
in 2007 have been addressed and corrected in 2010. Not saying that
all
that
you've mentioned are working differently, but I think it's a better
product.

But other than the utter slowdowns I've experienced where it seems
every
formula in a workbook was recalculated almost on a whim (not really,
just
seemed that way), I haven't experienced the plethora of problems you
allude
to. But then I mostly stuck with 2003 anyhow.

"msnyc07" wrote:

Truly you should be ashamed of Excel. I couldn't even BEGIN to
itemize
or
describe the utter hell of working with this application and the
literally
1000s of hours it has wasted of mine due to poor and sloppy
programming.
2007??? This is like a first release. From the ridiculous
non-standard
cut/paste cache, to the on-again off-again 'select all' that
destroys
sorts,
to the disappearing Freeze Top Pane, to the 'pervasive'
recalculations
that
don't turn off no matter what you do and d RUIN work, to the DAILY
crashes
and the need to dig through pages of work and formulas to figure out
where
you left off. I'd expect this from an offshore coder I hired for $8
not
Microsoft. I am done. Here's a clue; fix the core components
before
adding
new features. Because you are just building on a rotten foundation.

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to
the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click
the
"I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button,
follow
this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader
and
then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...et.f unctions

Thanks for the reply, it helps.

I am sure you can still see that is someone were to set their sheet to
'Manual' and THEN figure out that they had to further dig into to the Excel
Option to set it to Manual AND No Save that it would come as a surprise if
they then closed Excel, opened an earlier sheet they hadn't set to manual,
opened their Manual Sheet in an app they also set to Manual and were suddenly
in Automatic Mode and their formulas they took such care to have NOT update
updated which can, as you see by my posts, be an irreversibly damaging event.
Not a THING about that makes sense on any level. And each time I encounter
some thing like this, I am told I can make a Macro. Not sure why with
Document AND Application Settings I'd need to find out the hard way and then
program what should be the working and obvious functionality myself, anymore
then I should have to program a 'Keep Freeze Panes On when it is On' Macro.

Thank you though for the tip. Truly this is the last job in Excel it is
like dating a person who can go psycho on you at any time, and you just have
to anticipate and work around all the 'eccentricities'. No one and no program
is worth it, both will land you in the looney bin.

"Don Guillett" wrote:

I am responding purely on your excel setting the calculation to automatic.
Excel takes the option from the first workbook opened.
You could put a workbook_open macro to set calculation to MANUAL.

--
Don Guillett
Microsoft MVP Excel
SalesAid Software

"msnyc07" wrote in message
...
That isn't a minor bug Niek and nor is the crashing (and nor in fact are
the
other 'bugs'). I am not developing a website with Excel nor trying to
develop a sophisticated inventory management system.

And I know the software well enough. Should I seek a consultant to help
me:

Add a bunch of simple 4 field records to Excel
Indent as needed
Write a simple formula (check and return indent)

Are you saying that is beyond the scope or purpose of the software? Or
that
someone with moderate Excel Skills shouldn't be able to do that without
paying someone?

I am not a VBA expert nor a formula expert though I have learned those as
I
need them. That is not where i ran into problems though.

I shouldn't need a consultant to tell me that the Calculation Options in
the
Formula Menu are not complete should I?

I couldn't use a consultant to keep Excel from crashing 10x a week could
I?
Am I really pushing it's envelope that much with 50,000 records and a
single
formula???

I did have a friend offer to write a macro to keep the Freeze Panes
Frozen.
But isn't that an idiotic thing to need someone to write? Is it my lack
of
knowledge, if Freeze Panes becomes unfrozen by the software INTENTIONALLY
and
not because of bad coding, certainly the software should let you know at
least the first time yes ('Freeze Panes is disabled when it gets below 40
degrees" or some such)

Ditto Select All which often does not Select All. I have not made sense
of
that but again, if that is an intentional design, it should be explained
when
it first happens, as if i am selecting a 50,000 record sheet with 20
columns,
it is quite easy for me to miss the fact that Select All Selected Some and
my
sort has now ruined my data. If it is a flaw it should be fixed as it is
major, if it is a matter of me 'not knowing the software well' then I put
to
you that I shouldn't have to know the software well enough to figure THAT
out. How to use formulas, do complex manipulations, sure. But use Select
All???

Having spend 1000s of hours on this spreadsheet I can tell you that a good
20% of my time is spent dealing with these issues large and small. That
is
not an issue of my not knowing it it is an issue of poor design. I get it
does a lot of fancy things well. But again, those are less then useful if
the underlying functions aren't attended to. Certainly the developers who
added 'Recalculate on Save' to the Excel Formula OPTIONS should have
thought
to add it to the Formula Menu. You can't turn around and blame the user
because they didn't know you weren't standardinzing the functionality and
including it where it was most often and most obviously used and say 'Well
you should know that Manual Calculation is not fully implemented in the
Menu;

Blaming me is a cop-out. Blaming the scope of my 'project' is as well.
If
Excel is truly such a difficult program to gather and store simple records
with out formulas of functions, and you need a 'consultant' to do it,
something is truly Rotten in Denmark.

"Niek Otten" wrote:

I can understand that you're frustrated. Indeed there are a few problems
with Excel. But there are a few problems with every software product I
know,
and often more than a few.

What I can't understand is that you invest so much time and rely
completely
on a product that you apparently don't know very well. And that you use
it
for something that you may expect it to do (and that may even be
documented), but what it certainly wasn't meant for primarily.

I agree with the advice to seek professional consultancy. "Top consulting
firms" would not be my first choice to look for it. Real Office expertise
is
more often found with independent consultants or small companies. Quite a
few experts are regular posters in this group.

--
Kind regards,

Niek Otten
Microsoft MVP - Excel






"msnyc07" wrote in message
...
Recalculating cost me more then slowdowns it almost destroyed my work
and
caused me weeks of work. A (or should I say Yet another) crash
'corrupted'
my
file and it 'fixed' it by removing all formatting. I was using
Indenting
to
set up hierarchical tables and i had a formula column to derive that
for
parsing into a DB. FORTUNATELY I had run that so even though the
formatting
was gone the indents had been derived. Except Excel recalculated the
Indents
using the zero'd out reformatting. So now I had a workbook with 100
sheets
and 50,000 records in various states of relations representing 1000s of
hours
of work which was useless.

Note that I *had* set Calculate Option in the Menu to Manual. After
paiunfully rebuilding the document with old versions that I had to
audit
one
sheet by one sheet since the work has been on ongoing process I finally
put
the sheet back together with the right indent values.

So it turns out that Calculate Option in the Menu are not the *full*
options, that is that Manual means 'Manual Until You Save' and if you
want
'Manual Even When You Save' you need to go into the Excel Preferences
where
they ALSO have a Calculate Options Menu but THIS one has an added
'Recalculate on Save' Toggle. Naturally if one saw that when setting
options
one would know that that needed to either be on or off based on
preferences;
it is a phenomenal oversight in development to not include that on the
Menu
as well; Manual looks like just what it should mean and without an
option
for
Not on Save one would have no way of knowing that it was semi-manual
yes?

So between the (yet another) crash and the poor design I lost weeks of
work
and gained the same in frustration.

BUT it wasn't over. I shut down the PC and restarted and opened the
spreadsheet and started working and then parsed it. Lo and behold, the
values
had been re-set to zero so the parse and the carefully reconstructed
sheet
were useless. Why? Because Excel had re-set the Excel Options to
Automatic.
Why? Who Cares? So Manual in the Menu means 'Sort of until Excel
decides
to
overide when you Save' and Manual in the Options means 'Sort of until
Excel
decides to overide when you re-start'

This is the tip of the iceberg in my frustrations and as I mentioned I
had
a
friend at a consulting firm where they are whizzes with this sort of
stuff
encounter the same frustration.

Will it be addressed in 2010? I don't know and I don't believe I'll be
testing it out.

Thank you for the reasonable reply though.

"JLatham" wrote:

Have you tried 2010 yet? If not, you might set up a system with it on
it
and
give it a go. It would appear that many of the problems that were
admittedly
in 2007 have been addressed and corrected in 2010. Not saying that
all
that
you've mentioned are working differently, but I think it's a better
product.

But other than the utter slowdowns I've experienced where it seems
every
formula in a workbook was recalculated almost on a whim (not really,
just
seemed that way), I haven't experienced the plethora of problems you
allude
to. But then I mostly stuck with 2003 anyhow.

"msnyc07" wrote:

Truly you should be ashamed of Excel. I couldn't even BEGIN to
itemize
or
describe the utter hell of working with this application and the
literally
1000s of hours it has wasted of mine due to poor and sloppy
programming.
2007??? This is like a first release. From the ridiculous
non-standard
cut/paste cache, to the on-again off-again 'select all' that
destroys
sorts,
to the disappearing Freeze Top Pane, to the 'pervasive'
recalculations
that
don't turn off no matter what you do and d RUIN work, to the DAILY
crashes
and the need to dig through pages of work and formulas to figure out
where
you left off. I'd expect this from an offshore coder I hired for $8
not
Microsoft. I am done. Here's a clue; fix the core components
before
adding
new features. Because you are just building on a rotten foundation.

----------------
This post is a suggestion for Microsoft, and Microsoft responds to
the
suggestions with the most votes. To vote for this suggestion, click
the
"I
Agree" button in the message pane. If you do not see the button,
follow
this
link to open the suggestion in the Microsoft Web-based Newsreader
and
then
click "I Agree" in the message pane.

http://www.microsoft.com/office/comm...et.f unctions


.