.NET From India

Hide/Show Ribbons

I just found a feature in the Office 2007 ribbon when playing around in Win 7. Even though I have been using Office 2007 for around 2 years now, I was not aware of this and it just goes to show how many of those features are there in the Office Suite that users are not aware of and that most people just use around 25-30% of the overall avbl features.

If you double click on the tab header on a ribbon then the ribbon actually gets hidden.

A second double click actually restore the whole ribbon to the normal state.

This feature can also be access via the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+F1

A Strange Excel 2007 Bug

One of my friends pointed out this discussion on a strange Excel 2007 Bug.

Just multiply 850 by 77.1 in Excel. It gives a result of 100000. Calc will give you a result of 65535.

Interesting that someone actually found this..:)

Thanks Ankur for the link!!

Insert a Excel file into Work

One of my fellow MVPs raised the issue that with Office 2007 he was not able to insert an Excel File into a Word document as a file icon (You click on the icon and Excel is launched). That feature is still there, just not easy to find.

1. First copy the Excel file you want to embed using Ctrl+C

2. Click the arrow under the Paste Button and Choose "Paste Special"

3. Choose the Excel File Type and then click the "Insert as Icon" Checkbox.

4. Click OK and you are done..

Excel and Number Format

This post was actually triggered by a mail from a co-MVP, Saurav Basu, on some peculiar behavior he was facing with the way Excel formats numbers. His problems was

 

According to MS KB articles, One may change the Office Excel 2003 thousand separator by changing the Window's regional settings,

Now here is my config, Windows XP SP2 (Installed from Integrated WinXP SP2 Disk), and Office 2003 SP (Installed from Integrated Office2k3 SP2 Disk)..

The problem is, I have changed the Regional Settings in Windows XP to make sure number system separators works like this, 12,34,56,789.00 (India), but I don't see the reflection and Office 2003, Excel. !! Excel 2003 is still placing the numbers, the format, 123,456,789.00.

Since I was running only Excel 2007 (on Vista), I decided to check this out with that.

Surprise, surprise, I change the number format in Advanced Customization and nothing happens in excel (value formatted as Number, with the show thousand separator option chosen). Just out of curiosity I went ahead and changed the settings for the currency format in Vista and Excel changed the number format at once (no close/reopen, looks like they were listening for system setting change events, which is a good thing).

So I guess Excel's number format is based on Vista's Currency format and not its actual Number Format. But do note, this is only for the number grouping style. For all other stuff like the decimal separator, it seems to be taking the settings in the actual Number Format section.

My guess, some programmer just read the wrong registry entry or parameter or there is some documentation in an obscure corner of the microsoft site on why it works this way, but I have been unable to find it:)

Office 2007 Beta 2 TR – First things you will notice

Well most of the changes seem to be visual. The splash screens have changed and so have the application icons. Some of the icons in the Ribbons seem to have changed. I am not sure what else have changed, but I can see some extra options now being available from the blog posting mode.

I will post more as I start working with the newer build.

(Posted from Microsoft Word 2007 Beta 2 TR)