Excel 2007 Review – 10 things that WOWed me

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After a really long wait finally I have used … Excel 2007 (drum roll) and contrary to what many people think, I have found Excel 2007 to be a very well designed piece of software. Of course there are various issues with it and I am sure folks at MS are working on them so that next versions of MS Office are much more pleasant and simpler to use.

I wanted to share 10 wow factors in Excel 2007 that may convince you to try it.

1. The interface is gorgeous and easy on eyes

excel-2007-window

The Excel 2007 interface is very well polished and looks neat. It is easy on eyes with simple colors. All the file related activities can be accessed from office button on the top-left corner, while ribbon UI provides access to all excel features.

2. When you right click on a cell it shows formatting options as well

right-click-menu

Usually when you right click on a cell (or a range of cells) it is to format them. Now you can do that even faster. When you right click excel 2007 shows the standard formatting options as well.

3. Status bar now shows average and count as well

status-bar-data-summary

Remember how you can select a bunch of cells in excel 2003 and earlier and findout out their sum (or average or count) quickly by looking at status bar ? Well, now you can find out average, count and sum from status bar (actually you can add more options, just right click on status bar and choose the statistics you want)

4. Improved conditional formatting with micro charts

conditional-formatting

One of the significant new features of Excel 2007 is improved conditional formatting. It has all the goodness of excel 2003’s conditional formatting and on top added new features like incell micro charts. They are very easy to use.

5. You can format tables in a jiffy

table-formatting-excel

One of the most common formatting tasks is table formatting. Excel 2007 totally automated it with some gorgeous table formats. You can customized these styles very easily.

6. They have a Remove Duplicates button !!!

remove-duplicates-excel

That is right, finally a remove duplicates button. Select the data, press this button and mention whether you want to overwrite or paste in another place and that is all. Now, if only they could add other common data clean up tasks as buttons…

7. The default chart formatting is way better than that of Excel 2003

better-charts-excel

The default charts look much much better than those generated in earlier versions of Excel. What more, they have disabled annoyances like font-scaling by default. 🙂

8. Better and Visually Appealing Color Scheme

impressive-colors

The default color scheme is very good and provides excellent contrast when used in charts and tables. What more, the colors are no longer limited to 56 but you can add your own colors with much ease.

9. Ribbon is not that difficult to use

excel-2007-ribbon

The Ribbon UI has been criticized by lot of people. But it is not really that difficult to use and get used to. Although you would need 2-3 clicks for activities that previously took 1-2 clicks. It would have been excellent if MS had provided an option to switch to classic menu navigation.

10. Despite the new look most of the dialogs are same

familiar-dialogs-excel

Even though Excel 2007 may seem like a huge leap from Excel 2003, the underlying dialog boxes, customization options are all same as that of Excel 2003. For eg. you can see that Ctrl + 1 on a cell produces the above “format cells” dialog box which is almost same what you get in 2003 version of excel.

Another thing is all the excel 2003 keyboard shortcuts work in excel 2007, so power users who have learned the shortcuts over a period need not worry about productivity loss.

All in all, I found Excel 2007 pretty ok except for few glitches. I am planning to install (not upgrade) it on my personal computer as well so that I can experiment and learn more.

What is your take on Excel 2007 ? What are the features that wowed you?

PS: This review is based on my first look at the Excel 2007 and not an exhaustive review. I haven’t tested features like pivot tables, VBA, new formulas etc. Stay tuned for more excel 2007 articles in the coming weeks.

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38 Responses to “Time to showoff your VBA skills – Help me fix ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert snafu”

  1. shokks says:

    I tried your code with 2003, it works.

    But, I know Addpicture does not take URLs anymore with 2007 onwards, perhaps its the same with picture.insert as well.

    http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928983/en-us

    The above link gives the solution as "picture fill in a shape such as a rectangle".

  2. Vince E. says:

    Tried to recreate this, but it worked fine for me. I just took the image of the error you showed in the post. Is there more info that can narrow this down a bit?

  3. Ian Hinckley says:

    Hi

    Not sure if this is what you're after, but I just tried this

    Sub Macro1()
    ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert("http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif").Select
    End Sub

    Tied a button to it on the sheet and it seems to work; hope this helps a little

    Ian

  4. Chandoo says:

    @All.. the issue is in Excel 2007. In 2003 ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert seems to work fine. Unfortunately, I have design this in Excel 2007.. that is why I posted it here..

  5. Ian Hinckley says:

    v2

    Sub Macro1()
    Set n = ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert("http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif")
    With Range("c12")
    t = .Top
    l = .Left
    End With
    With n
    .Top = t
    .Left = l
    End With
    End Sub

    Ian

  6. Ian Hinckley says:

    That didn't come out very well. This positions at c12, so can change easily:
    Sub Macro1()
    Set n = ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert("http://www.google.co.uk/intl/en_uk/images/logo.gif")
    With Range("c12")
    t = .Top
    l = .Left
    End With
    With n
    .Top = t
    .Left = l
    End With
    End Sub

    Works OK in 2007

    Ian

  7. Chandoo:
    Try 'ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert'

    With ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert("C:\Example.png")
    .Left = ActiveSheet.Range("A1").Left
    .Top = ActiveSheet.Range("A1").Top
    End With

  8. Jon Peltier says:

    activesheet.pictures.insert "C:\Documents and Settings\Jon Peltier\Desktop\2007 stuff\insert_charts_2007.png"

    Works for me in 2003 SP3 and in 2007 SP2.

    Check the URL, and make sure you have internet connectivity.

    What also works, and is newer (pictures.insert was supposedly deprecated in '97):

    activesheet.shapes.addpicture "C:\Documents and Settings\Jon Peltier\Desktop\2007 stuff\insert_charts_2007.png", false, true, 200,200,100,100

    Unfortunately you must specify dimensions (the last four arguments) and you don't necessarily know them. But the picture size is still related back to the original picture size, so you could use scaleheight and scalewidth to fix this.

  9. Chandoo: I just re-read your post.

    The code I posted works for me. However, I'm using a local picture. If you try to add a picture from the web, this won't work.

    I remember solving this problem before by adding a rectangle shape first, then using the Shapes.AddPicture method to get a picture from the web.

    I'll find that code and post it here.

  10. Chandoo says:

    Some more updates... The code "ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert (path)" works fine in Excel 2007 at home. Strange it failed miserably on my work laptop. Do you think this has got something to do with SP2 of MS Office 2007 or something like that?

    @Ian, Jon: Thanks for the code snippets. I guess I will use my home installation of excel to do this.

  11. Chandoo:

    Try this on your work laptop:

    Sub test()
    ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddShape msoShapeRectangle, 50, 50, 100, 200
    ActiveSheet.Shapes(1).Fill.UserPicture _
    "http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/images/dpwithPig6.png"
    End Sub

  12. Jon Peltier says:

    I didn't mean to post code with a local file, because both approaches worked with an internet image as well. This is in Excel 2007 SP2.

    activesheet.pictures.insert "http://peltiertech.com/images/2009-07/col_area_noblanks.png"

  13. Jon: Looks like I have SP1 on my client machine! I wasn't paying attention.

    Just checked my home computer where I have SP2, and you're right...looks like they fixed it.

  14. Jon Peltier says:

    I didn't even bother testing in SP1, though I could if anyone cares enough.

  15. teylyn says:

    I'm afraid I don't have a solution, but I find it remarkable that after attaining a certain status in the Excel world, Chandoo does not need to post on an Excel discussion forum to get help for an Excel problem. Instead, he posts on his blog and all the gurus come rushing to his help.

    Isn't Web 2.0 great?

  16. Jon Peltier says:

    Teylyn - I saw Chandoo's tweet first, and followed the link back to his blog.

  17. Chandoo says:

    @Mike.. thank you. I have seen the fill rectangle solution before posting the query here. For that matter, I have also tried the solution of embedding a browser control on a spreadsheet. both of these seemed a bit extreme. That is why I have asked it here.

    But I guess I will end up using it if I had to build this in work laptop.

    @Teylyn: I have thought of posting this in a forum. (Unfortunately I have not been to any excel group in the last 5 years. Last time I was active was when I built a jave based excel sheet construction solution using POI.HSSF classes of Apache... ) After searching for a few hours, I found several forum posts where others had same problem and the solution recommended (using .left and .top parameters) is not working for me. Incidentally most of these solutions are from a certain Jon Peltier 😛

    I thought may be the problem is interesting for fellow blog readers. So I posted it here.

  18. Justin B says:

    Hi,
    Adapting the code in the question,

    [code]
    Sub InsPicture()
    pPath = "http://chandoo.org/images/pointy-haired-dilbert-excel-charts-tips.png"
    With ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(pPath)
    .Left = Range("a1").Left
    .Top = Range("a1").Top
    End With
    End Sub
    [/code]

    Seems to work fine

  19. Jon Peltier says:

    Looks like it was a problem in 2007 up to SP1, which was corrected in SP2.

  20. Chandoo says:

    @Jon.. seems like the case. I just checked the version at work laptop. it is 12.0.6331.5000 (SP1).

    Thank you so much every one. I really appreciate your time and suggestions in solving this.

  21. Jon Peltier says:

    Glad to help. I couldn't understand why something so straightforward wasn't working.

  22. Kieranz says:

    Hi All
    Is there a way of inserting a motion clip eg animated gif or swf or flv?
    Thks

    • Chandoo says:

      You can insert animated GIFs by inserting them in a browser control through VBA. For other types of movies, I can guess you can insert them as clip art.

  23. ashvini says:

    I WANT THE INSERT PICTURE BY USING COADING

  24. Lutz says:

    so currently i was struggling same as you, chandoo, with the insert picture method in excel 2007/10 from an url and came along your thread here.

    so i re-designed the code on the addshape method as mike was suggesting it and all of the sudden it works just fine.

    thanks alot to you guys, you were a great help
    a big salut from switzerland

  25. Santiago says:

    Hi guys,

    I need help copying and pasting an image with the path in a cell.
    I leave the code.

    And thank you very much!

    Sub Copiarimg()

    Dim pic As Picture

    With ActiveSheet

    Set pic = .Pictures.Insert(Range("f2").Value)

    With .Range("e9:g22")
    pic.Top = .Top
    pic.Left = .Left
    pic.Width = .Width
    pic.Height = .Height
    End With
    End Sub

  26. I've played around with the approaches in these comments, and the code below is what I've come up with. The ImagePath can be a local file or a URL. As Jon mentioned above, the trick is to set an arbitrary value for the width and height, then call the ScaleWidth and ScaleHeight methods afterward to reset the picture to its original size. Once the LockAspectRatio property is set, you can change the picture width and the height will automatically scale (or vice-versa).

    Sub AddPictureToRange(TopLeftCellAddress As String, ImagePath As String)

    Dim pic As Shape
    Dim l As Single, t As Single
    Dim temp As Single

    l = Me.Range(TopLeftCellAddress).Left
    t = Me.Range(TopLeftCellAddress).Top
    temp = 10# ' arbitrary value

    Set pic = Me.Shapes.AddPicture(ImagePath, msoFalse, msoTrue, l, t, temp, temp)
    pic.ScaleHeight 1#, msoTrue
    pic.ScaleWidth 1#, msoTrue
    pic.LockAspectRatio = msoTrue

    End Sub

  27. dip says:

    I need some help with inserting pictures. I have an excel file with a column of item numbers next to this row I want to insert a picture of this item. The pictures are coded with the item number so I tried to insert it with one of the codes above:

    Sub InsPicture()
    pPath = "http://img.bricklink.com/P/80/55236.gif"
    With ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(pPath)
    End With
    End Sub

    That worked but I need to do that for every row separtly.
    So I tried in the code
    pPath = "http://img.bricklink.com/P/80/"&Text(a1;"#")&".gif"

    But that gives errors.

    Anybody ideas?

  28. alex says:

    Hi Nicholas, I used your solution in a related problem in Excel 2003 and it worked flawlessly..thank you!

  29. Richard says:

    Hi Mike Alexander,

    Your solution with some changes was helpful in my problem in XL 2007, thanks.

  30. seejay says:

    Hi,

    thanks all. In addition, I had a problem with multiple pictures inserting (every new picture replaced the prior one). I've changed it a bit, may be helpful..

    Sub test()
    ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddShape msoShapeRectangle, 50 , 50, 100, 200
    ActiveSheet.Shapes(1).Fill.UserPicture _
    "http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/images/dpwithPig6.png"
    ActiveSheet.Shapes(1).Copy
    ActiveSheet.Paste
    End Sub

  31. Jon Peltier says:

    Try this instead:
     
    Sub test()
    ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddShape msoShapeRectangle, 50 , 50, 100, 200
    ActiveSheet.Shapes(ActiveSheet.Shapes.Count).Fill.UserPicture _
    "http://www.datapigtechnologies.com/images/dpwithPig6.png"
    End Sub

    • Kez says:

      Thanks to everyone, this thread has been very helpful. However, image inserting still doesn't work quite as expect for me.

      While I can get a picture inserted into an Excel 2010 worksheet using either:

      1) ActiveSheet.Shapes(ActiveSheet.Shapes.Count).Fill.UserPicture...
      2) ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(pPath), and
      3) Shapes.AddPicture...

      unfortunately the images all insert with a display size determined not by the actual pixel dimensions of the image but by the dpi resolution.

      So for example, if I insert two copies of the exact same 600x600 pixel image, one with a 300dpi resolution and the other with 72dpi, they display at vastly different sizes on screen.

      While this might be intended behaviour for Excel in order to maintain a WSYWIG printing layout, I actually need a way to insert the image based on the the actual pixel dimesnsions and ignoring the dpi resolution.

      Any help appreciated.

      Thanks
      Kez

  32. Kez says:

    Not doing an intentional bump, but realised I posted in rely to one of the repsonses here instead of to the main thread, so reposting.
    =====

    Thanks to everyone, this thread has been very helpful. However, image inserting still doesn’t work quite as expected for me.

    While I can get a picture inserted into an Excel 2010 worksheet using any of the below methods:

    1) ActiveSheet.Shapes(ActiveSheet.Shapes.Count).Fill.UserPicture....
    2) ActiveSheet.Pictures.Insert(pPath), and
    3) Shapes.AddPicture....

    unfortunately the images all insert with a display size determined not by the actual pixel dimensions of the image but by the dpi resolution.

    So for example, if I insert two copies of the exact same 600×600 pixel image, one with a 300dpi resolution and the other with 72dpi, they display at vastly different sizes in Excel on screen.

    While this might be intended behaviour for Excel in order to maintain a WYSIWYG printing layout, I actually need a way to insert the images based on the the actual pixel dimesnsions and ignoring the dpi resolution.

    Any help appreciated.

    Thanks
    Kez

  33. Kez says:

    Well, answered my own question 🙂

    For those who might be interested, you can use this function:

    Public Function GetPicDims(strFilePath As String, strFileName As String) As String
    GetPicDims = CreateObject("Shell.Application").Namespace((strFilePath)). _
    ParseName(strFileName).ExtendedProperty("Dimensions")
    End Function

    to get the dimensions of the image you want to insert. Then you can parse the return string and use the width and height values to add a rectangle shape of the appropraite size, like:

    ActiveSheet.Shapes.AddShape msoShapeRectangle 50, 50, iWidth, iHeight

    which you then fill with the picture:

    ActiveSheet.Shapes(ActiveSheet.Shapes.Count).Fill.UserPicture "c:\temp\test.jpg"

    This way the picture gets inserted using the pixel dimensions and the (print) resolution gets ignored.

    If desired, the GetPicDims function can be made more generic to get other ExtendedProperties.

    Regards
    Kez

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