One Down, Three To Go

Today was my deadline for turning in the final chapters for Excel 2007 Bible. All that remains is the Preface, and that should take me about 30 minutes. But the book is certainly not finished. It will be reviewed by the project editor, a copy editor, and a technical editor. When the next Office 2007 beta is released, I'll have one more chance to make changes, additions, and make sure the screen shots are accurate.

I was surprised to see that the book is already listed on Amazon, and it has a sales rank of 172,384. How can that be?

The Amazon listing (and also the book cover mock-up) indicates that the book's CD will include a trial version of my Power Utility Pak add-in. Unfortunately, that's not the case. PUP will require some major changes before it works well with Excel 2007. I plan on making a special version that will work only with Excel 2007, but I won't have time to do that until the books are finished. Next up is Excel 2007 VBA Programming For Dummies. That will be followed by Excel 2007 Power Programming With VBA, and then the fun one: Excel 2007 Charts.

After working with Excel 2007, I'm starting to like it quite a bit. A few weeks ago, I turned the corner and realized that I much prefer Excel 2007 over Excel 2003. It's really just a matter of getting used to the new interface. Now, I have a hard time remembering where the commands are in Excel 2003. A key difference is appearance. The new fonts and graphics are just much nicer to work with. When I open a file in Excel 2003, it looks old and clunky to me. And the charts look atrocious compared to the new charts.

Excel 2007 certainly isn't perfect. Some of the deficiencies, I think, will be fixed in the final version. But we'll just have to live with the other problems -- the main one being the inability for the end user to customize the user interface. A major upgrade like this involves trade-offs. You give up some things and get other things in return. All things considered, the scale definitely tips in favor of Excel 2007.