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Questions from Brisbug, 17th June 2007

By Nick Hodge | June 17, 2007

qf502

First flight to Bris­bane, Sydney Air­port 17th June 2007. Up at 4.30am, at the air­port at 5.45am. Up so early, even the cats were sur­prised. Actu­ally one of the cats didn’t even bother to come out and visit as it was so early. Motor into Windor to present to 25–30 mem­bers of the Bris­bug User Group.

brisbugjun07 003

There were some unanswered ques­tions, which I will tackle here:

Office Pub­lisher 2007, break­ing links. Break For­ward Link: this is the pro­cess of remov­ing the link­age from the cur­rent Text Box to the next, and retain­ing the text. From my quick research, Pub­lisher 2007 does not change the func­tion­al­ity com­pared to pre­vi­ous versions.

Chan­ging the selection/highlight col­our in Word/Excel. This is rel­at­ively easy: Microsoft Word, as other well writ­ten Win­dows pro­grams, respect the set­ting “Selec­ted Item” col­our in the Dis­play Con­trol Panel. This allows you to change the back­ground col­our that shows high­lighted items, includ­ing text. Also note that Word 2007 has a zoom to make it easier to see text on screen.

OEM Win­dows XP Ser­vice Pack 2, Media Cen­ter. Install issue related to CDs with poor word­ing for insert CD (near bot­tom of chat tran­script from May 2006). Seems like its an issue that is related to the word­ing of the install screen, not an error with the installer.

Links: Office 2007 file open­ing with pre­vi­ous ver­sions of Office: If you have a mix­ture of Office 2007 and older ver­sions on your home net­work, this http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=941b3470-3ae9-4aee-8f43-c6bb74cd1466&DisplayLang=en is the link to the plugin.

Update: 28th June 2007: Office 2003 vs. 2007 menus: http://blogs.technet.com/seanearp/archive/2007/06/27/office-2007-what-ever-happened-to-that-menu-option.aspx

Excel Fin­ance func­tion changes. The fin­an­cial func­tions in Excel, apart from Nett Present Value and Com­pound­ing Interest, have sort of baffled me. From the help file:

Easy for­mula writing

The fol­low­ing improve­ments make for­mula writ­ing much easier in Office Excel 2007.

Res­iz­able for­mula bar   The for­mula bar auto­mat­ic­ally res­izes to accom­mod­ate long, com­plex for­mu­las, which pre­vents the for­mu­las from cov­er­ing other data in your work­sheet. You can also write longer for­mu­las with more levels of nest­ing than you could in earlier ver­sions of Excel.

Func­tion Auto­Com­plete   With Func­tion Auto­Com­plete, you can quickly write the proper for­mula syn­tax. From eas­ily detect­ing the func­tions that you want to use to get­ting help com­plet­ing the for­mula argu­ments, you will be able to get for­mu­las right the first time and every time.

Auto­com­plete assists with the writ­ing of a for­mula. The most linked ref­er­ence on the web for Fin­an­cial func­tion (now the how, more the why) is from here.

Topics: microsoft, technology, windows, windowsxp | 1 Comment »

One Response to “Questions from Brisbug, 17th June 2007”

  1. Mehdi Says:
    February 19th, 2008 at 6:18 am

    “Chan­ging the selection/highlight col­our in Word/Excel. This is rel­at­ively easy: Microsoft Word, as other well writ­ten Win­dows pro­grams, respect the set­ting “Selec­ted Item” col­our in the Dis­play Con­trol Panel…”

    Just an FYI: Excel does *not* respect this. I’ve set my Win­dows highlight-color to be RGB 10,28,236; Excel shows it as RGB 234,236,245 (near-white). I also set my high­lighted text to be color RGB 255,255,255 (that would make white text on a dark blue back­ground)… Excel keeps the text RGB 0,0,0. I actu­ally did a screen dump of a selec­tion in Excel, pas­ted in in Pain.Net, and used the drop­per to get the col­ors used.

    From what I under­stand, the only way to make Excel obey Win­dows set­tings is to select High Con­trast as your Win­dows Desktop theme… which, imho, is a bit extreme for a single pro­gram that doesn’t behave.

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