Things I learned using Excel 2007

[hatman]

1) Not an easy transition from 2003 to 2007

2) Where did the Drawing Toolbar go to? How come I can't figure out how to draw a simple LINE on a chart?

3) 1 gigabyte of ram doesn't seem to be enough to create an XY scatter plot containing more than a couple of curves having only 10,000 points per curve. WTF? I can plot up to 32,000 data points per curve, with 30 or 40 curves per plot, and 10 or 15 plots per file in 2003, and it runs faster.

4) Speaking of 32,000 points, what with all the extra rows in 2007, why are charts still limited to 32,000 data pints per curve?

5) There are about 137,450 paramters that the Space Station updates on it's telemetry thread to Mission Control at some ridiculously fast rate of speed. I learned this when I opened the CSV file of available parameters in Excel 2007, and subsequently encountered an error as I tried to save it back to Excel 2003.

6) Speaking of those 137k parameters, they only represent a small portion of data available through Data Dump utilities. And yet, only a few hundred parameters are monitored by human operators on the ground at any given time.

7) You'd be AMAZED at how frequently the telemetry stream from the space station is lost due to interference, or unavailablity of relay satellites. They can predict signal losses to within a second or so DAYS in advance.

8) Did I mention that charting telemetry from the space station is darn near impossible with Excel 2007... just too much data... but I can plot it in seconds with 2003.

 

[ExcelChampion]

I think the layout of Excel 2007 is much more cumbersome. Drop down menus are quicker and more effective. Plus, you can see more options at once with older versions of Excel. What is with the huge ribbon icons? Can those be made smaller?

 

[justme]

I think 2007 is a lot slower also. Saves take more time. I have learned to customize the Quick Access Toolbar by right clicking the icon in the upper left corner and placing the commands I use the most in there. I also show the QA toolbar under the Ribbon. It makes more sense to me there.

I do need the extra columns for spreadsheets used it at work. I don't like it so much I would upgrade my software at home.

For the most part I haven't had problems saving as a 2003 file when I have to share my file with others at work still using 2003. Powerpoint had some weird things going on with font size changing, but I haven't checked it out thoroughly.