From The Naked PC issue #5.06...

Office XP: What's New in Excel XP

by Lee Hudspeth
March 14, 2002

In this series of articles I'll cover Excel XP's new features, describe each one briefly, and grade each one on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 = useless and 10 = top-notch.

Some of these features also apply to Excel's sibling Office applications. Note that whenever describing any Office feature, regardless of the version, 90% of the time there are at least two different ways to get there through the UI. Due to space constraints, in this article I focus on the UI techniques that I think are the easiest to discover.

1. Digitally sign a document (workbook) -- Digitally sign a document to prove it was you--or your company--who created it. You need a digital certificate to actually sign a document yourself, although you can always see who, if anyone, signed a document.
UI: Tools, Options, Security, click Digital Signatures, and add your digital certificate.
Grade: 7 (nice feature, but a tad hard to discover)

2. Customize the Places Bar -- Put your own drives or folders here, rearrange them, and rename them.
UI: File, Open (or Save or Save As), right-click on the Places Bar, pick commands from the list. Also (and this is the awkward part), select the *parent* of a drive or folder object in "Look in" then select the desired object, click Tools, Add to "My Places".
Grade: 7 (nice feature, but the add operation is hard to discover)

3. New from existing workbook -- Create a new workbook using an existing workbook as a template. Before Excel XP you could only do this with a macro, by right-clicking on a workbook in Windows Explorer and clicking New, or by saving a workbook first as a template which could then be used to spawn children workbooks.
UI: View, Task Pane, pick New Workbook from the Task Panes drop- down list, click the "Choose workbook..." hyperlink under "New from existing workbook".
Grade: 6 (works fine, but limited usefulness)

4. Task Pane -- Appears on the right margin at startup. It offers several often-used features: New Workbook, Clipboard, Search, and Insert Clip Art.
UI: View, Task Pane.
Grade: 10 (cool, but I prefer keeping the pane turned off until I need it: scroll to the very bottom of the pane and clear the "Show at startup" check box)

5. Web Query -- This feature existed before, but has a much improved dialog box now (like a small browser window) with which you can easily select one or more tables from a Web page for import into Excel. You just click the small yellow box--with a right-pointing arrow inside--that points to each table, then click Import.
UI: Data, Import External Data, New Web Query.
Grade: 7

6. Select Data Source -- This new dialog is a centralized interface for importing data from any source.
UI: Data, Import External Data, Import Data.
Grade: 7

7. Find and Replace -- The essential "Find and Replace" dialog has two new features. One, searches are no longer limited to the current sheet; you can now search the entire workbook. Two, now you can search based on formatting (including a nifty format chooser mode; you select a cell whose format you want to look for other instances of, all while the dialog is still displayed).
UI: Edit, Find, click the Options button if the Format drop-down control isn't displayed otherwise the dialog is in its "fully expanded" mode, click the Within drop-down and choose Sheet or Workbook. To explore the format search options, click on the Format drop-down control.
Grade: 10 (eminently useful)

8. Edit Links -- This dialog has been updated to include three new features. One, you can check the status of a link; status descriptions are found in the help topic "Check status of and fix links" (click the dialog's "Check Status" button). Two, there's an option to break a link, which replaces it with a static representation of its last known value (click the dialog's "Break Link" button). Three, you can configure an individual workbook's links-related startup prompt to one of three settings (click the dialog's "Startup Prompt" button).
UI: Edit, Links.
Grade: 6

9. Emailing a range -- Select any range in a worksheet, click the E-mail button on the Standard toolbar, choose "Send the current sheet as the message body", enter the recipient's email address, type in an introduction comment (optional), then click "Send this Selection".
UI: see above.
Grade: 7

There are dozens more new features in Excel XP. I'll delve into them in future articles.

You can reach Lee Hudspeth at:
mailto:LeeHudspeth@TheNakedPC.com

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