Customization, Macro and VBA Annoyances: This whole section is gold waiting to be mined by the expert Excel user. The cutest tip is the one that shows you how to edit the default smiley-face for custom Toolbar buttons. There are lots of targeted macros and VBA procedures, plus references to online sources for helpful third-party utilities.
Excel 2003 Annoyances: The best tip here is in the section intro: why starting PhotoShop after Excel 2003 is running will sometimes crash your computer. This section also covers how not to be driven crazy by the Extensible Markup Language (XML).
As if all these solutions were not enough, Frye includes dozens of links to free creative Excel goodies. My favorite: a downloadable spreadsheet Tetris game. Frye notes, "If the United States' leading economic indicators drop suddenly after Excel Annoyances hits the store shelves, blame it on this sidebar."
If I had any complaint, it would be the choice of red to indicate cell commands, formulas and other Excel text. It was probably done to limit the ink to two colors, black and red. Nevertheless, the red text elements are difficult to read, which means they are easy to misread.
Article comments
1 - Sisyphus
This looks great! Thank you! I'm referring to the reference to the Photoshop and Excel 2003 conflict! I have to check this out ASAP as it is driving me bonkers. Another annoyance: no integrated way to share workbooks over the web (yes, there are third party tools like BadBlue and Soft Writer that seem to fill the niche... but nothing from Microsoft?).
2 - Curt Frye
Hi Sisyphus,
I didn't know about BadBlue; if I had, I certainly would have mentioned it. I believe SharePoint is Microsoft's solution for collaborative web sharing, though you can let your co-workers access shared files over a LAN by setting the appropriate folder permissions.
Thanks for the lead!
Curt
3 - DrPat
Thank you for feedback on the review, Curt! And let me say again how USEFUL your book is to any level of Excel user.
4 - sohbet
But I'm a law professor. Why doesn't isthatlegal.org count?
5 - Justin
the annoyance/fix on this page saved me a lot of time. book must be great
6 - Dustin
Thanks for the tip on selecting only visible cells. I was having a nightmare trying to format my monthly reports... hidden cells containing confidential information can be a bit of a problem! I don't know what Microsoft was thinking.