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.
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