Comments on: Spreadsheet modes

By: Bob Phillips

Bob Phillips — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:26:43 +0000

While I’m at it, it wouldn’t hurt to have another function that would return which conditional formatting rule a particular cell satisfied (aw shucks, it’d only work with discrete conditional formatting rules) and be able to return an array when passed a single area multiple cell array.

Get’s damn near impossible in 2007.

By: Harlan Grove

Harlan Grove — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 16:29:54 +0000

No more than 3 levels of nesting?

Dunno ’bout the rest of you, but most of the howlers I’ve seen in spreadsheets come from simple referencing errors, INDEX 2nd and 3rd arguments 1 off, deleted rows/columns, ranges including hidden rows/columns, MATCH/LOOKUP/[VH]LOOKUP assuming sorted ranges which aren’t. Not sure any strict mode would make any of that less likely.

My impression is people who want to do this only know how to select (colloquially, NOT in the Excel OM sense) particular cells by changing their format. They don’t know how to set up check boxes, and even then without VBA it’s tedious to tie checkbox state to cell ranges. So they’re stuck wanting to count/sum/etc by format. Seems to me what’s needed is a cell-within-range user selection object that’d save user selection state in a separate range, along with a new function that would return the user selection state range when passes a reference to a range within the source range. Then it’d just be =SUMPRODUCT(NEWFCN(foo)*foo). This’d also require a dialog – select the range, run a command that displays the dialog which asks where the top-left corner of the state range should be (and in a radical departure from way too much Excel ‘functionality’, it should allow the state range to be in a different worksheet) and how selected cells should be formatted differently from other cells within the source range.

And while I’m in a cranky mood, the single greatest boon to NEW Excel developers would be deprecating merged cells.

By: Ross MIE

Ross MIE — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:08:50 +0000

Yeah very good idea, excellent idea in fact! I think the details would be a really git to sort out, but I think the principle is really good, it’s not unlike marking a SS against a list of criteria and giving it a score in many ways – would it run in to VBA as well?

I’m not sold on the idea that it would work as an addin. I think it might have to be part of Excel, but maybe we could get it going as an addin to start off with.

Would I contribute code? Would anyone want my code! Maybe!!! to both :)

By: Rob Bruce

Rob Bruce — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 10:56:02 +0000

Looking at this from the other end, an addin like this would fit nicely into a larger suite of tools to check for best-practice compliance on any given spreadsheet project.

On the other hand, it would need to be configurable in order to fit into any number of paradigms of ‘best practice’ and this always has the possibility of making the tool too complex for all but a tiny minority of people (those of us who come here, basically ;-)

Yes I would contribute code. And I might buy such a thing. Not both, though!