Frequently asked questions

Have been away from the board for a short while, and looking at the unanswered posts, thew first one I come across is this

I want to put a listbox in a cell that when I point to an item in the 1st listbox it will open another listbox. Something similar like when you click on your windows start button. I am using excel 2000 and I can help myself a bit with vba

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I have assumed that this is the USA and FRANCE etc post from ages ago.

http://www.mrexcel.com/board2/viewtopic.php?t=110641

I know of three occasions I have pointed to someone to this post. No doubt there have been others.

My question is whether or not it would be possible to have a new area in this site, titled Frequently Asked Questions and have something similar to Microsoft Excel Help, but obviously easier to read and understand.

I appreciate that this would be a major task, but it may be a bit easier that the SEARCH facility. You could have one post per function/formulae, i.e. VLOOKUP, and members here could provide the solutions.

I'm not having a dig at this site, as I am amazed at the amount of help that is given, its just that there must be a lot of duplication/repetition of solutions/answers (i.e. how many SUMPRODUCT questions have there been?).

Another drawback I can see is that the poster of a question, may not know which function/formulae to use, so they would be in the same situation as they are now.

Has anyone else any thoughts?

I was going to say that there was an Excel Wiki created for just such a purpose, but I just went to the link (http://www.mrexcel.com/tip110.shtml) and now see that it has been taken off line due to spammers!! Truly unfortunate. I do like the idea of a 'Greatest tips and Tricks' thread though, might just be the right place to point people to.

Take care.

Owen

The Wiki was a great idea, but it was just getting fubar'd by spammers like you said and it was being cleaned up manually.

You would have to check with Tracy (starl) to see if there are any plans to bring it back to life.

Smitty

Out of this topic...

I would like to add a suggestion. If the managers can plan something for uploading excel files with which users have problems in respect to the functions or the formulae which they cannot resolve at their end.

I suggest this as we are well aware other websites on the internet just like OZGRID provide this kind of facilities which indeed provide much more flexibility to the end users

Stormseed,

There has been great debate on the subject of uploading files. I do not pretend to be a good representative for either camp - primarily because I find myself vacillating between pro & con. The pro-upload would allow greater flexibility. The con-uploads make good points that it can encourage laziness, it consumes bandwidth, many folks have grave reservations about opening the workbook of someone they don’t know, and unless the code gets posted, you do have to download the book to see the code.

Last I heard there are no plans to enable file uploads though there is probably a group that would like to see it if for no other reason than to see Tushar goaded into another eloquent rant about the evils of file uploads.

And I mourned the loss of the wiki about as much as anyone. I thought it was a very underutilized tool. But the spammers truly have *no* mercy at all. There is not a grain of decency in them. They were absolutely, completely, utterly relentless in their attacks. In the end we were unable to keep them out and Bill had to pull the plug.

I like the idea of FAQs as a section too. It may be that there are just too many to list, though...

How about a frequently handled subject section? Instead of individual questions, it could focus on specific issues for example:

Excel Security features
Access Security features
Import Excel to Access
Export to Excel from Access
Run Macros from another application
Conversions (such as text to number, date to text, etc)
Code samples
Normalization
you get the idea...

It doesn't hurt to ask the question more than once, because a really great new idea might come from somewhere as a result. The more posts you see on a subject, the more different ways you find to do something and the better the likelihood that you will be able to adapt a solution to meet your needs.

On the other hand, answering the same question 50 times can be a bit of overkill. Just how much space do you have in the archives anyway?

Max

Hi Mr. Greg,

I do appreciate and respect the decisions of the board rulers. I do agree with the spamming factor on the board and their ruthless attacks...On second thoughts can we not have a validation policy put across which wud indeed help the board to override the spammers and laziness ?

Well...its indeed a suggestion or you can say my standpoint