I haven’t bought an Excel book since 2003. Time to get current again
I haven’t bought Excel since 2003. Do I need to get current?
The question just got deeper and broader. I know there have been significant changes in other Office products with the 2007 release, not sure how much was added to Excel (however, for the pivot enthusiast , I read there were some added features)
Sigh… May have to renew my MSDN subscription and update my stuff.
bollocks. use your google
mrexcel.com is all you need. Though there is one very good book that teaches the most useful stuff in VBA for financial modeling.
Some updates with Excel 2007 are: 1,000,000 rows vs. 32,000 16,000 columns vs. 256 1,000,000 Pivot Table rows vs. 64,000 Also some other capacity improvements. The amount of data held in excel 2007 helps a lot, other than that, the new menu layout and the compatibility with older versions of the application are pretty annoying in my opinion
I’m struggling a little with the new menu layout in 2007. It is ok, but I find myself futzing around a lot, looking for things that I used to know how to do.
Hmm. I wouldn’t care about those capacity improvements. If I have that much data I’m using something else to analyze it.
I always thought there were 65536 rows and ditto JDVs sentiments
I always thought there were 65536 rows and ditto JDVs sentiments
I’d guess that is probably why they never increased the amount of rows previously. It also depends on what tools you are provided by your employer and which tools the users know how to use. Excel is the default application provided to most to analyze data, build reports & graphs. If Excel is all that you have to use to build graphs, analyze data, or all you know how to use, the additional rows could be very useful. At a Microsoft conference I attended for Office 2007, the company said that they increased the capacity of excel due to complaints from the corporate user base. BTW, you are correct, 65,536 rows were available prior to 2007, not 32k… Either way, Microsoft added a lot of rows to the latest version of excel
The increase in the number of columns may have some uses. You can now, for example, model a 25 year project monthly (with months going across). Obviously it may be better to stick to quarterly, but I could see an argument for monthly. The other increases in capacity will only ensure even worse models. For example, previously Excel had all sorts of problems if you referenced one cell more than 65536 times. Apparently that is now fixed, but really was that a problem with Excel or the user? Can anyone currently using Excel 2007 tell me whether Microsoft have “fixed” the following 2003 irritations? - does Ctrl A do what you’d think it should? - when you F12 a read-only file, does it still kindly add “Copy of” at the beginning?
Why on God’s green earth would you model a TWENTY-FIVE year project MONTHLY? I spent a little time working with E 2007 and I can’t stand it.
HoldSideAnalyst Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > Why on God’s green earth would you model a > TWENTY-FIVE year project MONTHLY? > > I spent a little time working with E 2007 and I > can’t stand it. Well, I wouldn’t, but some people seem to like the idea. I think the argument goes something like this. The construction phase of a project has to be monthly (no argument from anyone there) and it would be nice if the first year or so post-construction was monthly to avoid working capital issues etc… so why not make the whole thing on a consistent timeframe and do it monthly. Another reason might be that you could report annual figures for any year end. As I said, I don’t like it.
Oh, can someone recommend a book how to solve CFA related problems with Excel? For example “Excel for Financial Analyst” … 
I have the Benninga book. Pretty basic stuff but a fun read if you don’t know anything.
I got the EXCEL Bible. It’s ok as a quick reference guide for doing little things. It has intro VBA too. However it’s nothing you can’t find using the help function.