Im using Excel 2011 for Mac. Im using a Mac and am very new to macros. Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel. Office 365 (Mac) Note that these instructions do not pertain to the online versions of these programs.
Microsoft Excel 2008 Record Ro Update To ExcelThe menus and menu items are nearly identical, and the worksheet itself is the same as it’s always been.Macros are a set of recorded actions that let you automate tasks so that you do not have to repeat the same task again and again. Despite the long wait for a new version, when you launch Excel 2008, you’ll see what appears to be a slightly re-skinned version of Excel 2004—or even of Excel v.X. It’s been more than three years since the last update to Excel ( ), the leading Mac spreadsheet.![]() After you enter a formula name, the Formula Builder displays input boxes and brief descriptions for each element in that formula. Unfortunately, there’s no way to disable any of these Elements Gallery buttons, so even if you never use them, they’ll take up some vertical space on every sheet you open.Another new feature—the Formula Builder—makes building formulas simpler. As an example, I downloaded Apple’s stock price history—daily high, low, close, and volume—and was able to turn it into a nice-looking stock chart with a couple of mouse clicks. Personally, I have no use for the Sheets or WordArt buttons, but both Charts and SmartArt Graphics make it simple to add professional-looking images to your spreadsheets. Here’s one that’s had three custom images applied, and the stock text replaced.Whether or not you find the Gallery useful will depend on how you use Excel. Like its predecessor, the Toolbox can quickly grow taller than your screen, especially on a laptop—if that happens, you’ll have to close some sections in order to see others.The new toolbar icons are easier to read than Excel 2004’s, and the section headers in the Toolbox are colored, making them easier to spot at a glance. A new Reference Tools tab in the Toolbox gives fast access to a thesaurus and dictionary (though these aren’t the ones built into OS X), an encyclopedia, and even a Web search box. In Excel 2008, the Formatting Palette has merged with the Toolbox, which is now tabbed, and looks more like an Inspector panel in one of Apple’s iWork applications. Select one of the displayed formulas, and Excel 2008 will complete the formula’s name, then display a floating tooltip showing each required element in that formula.In Excel 2004, I used two floating palettes regularly—the Toolbox, which held a scrapbook, compatibility tester, and project interface and the Formatting Palette, which offered formatting options for text, images, and graphics. As you start typing a formula name, Formula AutoComplete displays a pop-up menu with matching formulas. This feature can be a big timesaver, especially for those formulas that you don’t use often enough to memorize their syntax.Formula AutoComplete further speeds the entry of formulas. The similar performance isn’t all that surprising—Excel 2004 never felt like much of a laggard when running in the Rosetta emulation mode on an Intel Mac. However, my tests found almost no measurable performance differences when recalculating a complex worksheet, or moving around and selecting cells within a large worksheet. When comparing the performance of the two versions of Excel on an Intel machine, Excel 2008 launches notably faster—both on initial and subsequent launches. Finally, support for graphics and images is better all around in Excel 2008, with improved transparency and shadow effects.As mentioned above, this is the first version of Excel to run natively on both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs. Free blu ray movies onlineAnyone with a collection of macro-enabled spreadsheets will be forced to replace those macros with AppleScript (where possible), or learn to do without. (You can also cancel the open request.)This is the major failing in Excel 2008, and the primary reason many users—myself included—won’t be upgrading. If you try to open a macro-enabled worksheet, you’ll have two choices: open and remove the macros, or open and leave the macros in place, though they won’t run. Using the descriptions of each input box, just point and click to build the formula you need.As the review of Word 2008 ( ) noted, Excel 2008 doesn’t support Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is the language used to create and record macros in prior versions of Excel. Despite three-plus years of development, Excel 2008 still doesn’t support Services, so more work is required to use text from Excel in other programs.Excel 2008 also wastes a lot of vertical screen real estate. Missing features and other foiblesExcel 2004 lacked support for Services, a standard OS X feature that lets you select snippets of text and send them to other applications. The new Toolbox merges the old Toolbox and Formatting Palette from Excel 2004 the end result resembles the Inspector panel from Apple’s iWork. The only alternative is to assign it a keyboard shortcut, for use from the Script menu. However, this version lacks any ability to record AppleScripts, as Excel 2004 could do with macros, so you’ll have to write everything from scratch.You can’t, however, attach an Automator workflow or AppleScript to a button in Excel 2008, as one can do with macros in Excel 2004. That doesn’t make it a bad program—Excel is still the best spreadsheet app on the Mac, by far. (It must be moved to a location with a shorter path first.) Macworld’s buying adviceThere really aren’t any truly innovative features in Excel 2008 that help push the spreadsheet paradigm forward—not a single new feature struck me as a “must have” reason to upgrade. For instance, if you have a file located on a lengthy path (more than 200 characters), you cannot open it in Excel 2008, just as you couldn’t open it in Excel 2004. (You can disable the toolbar entirely, though that will force you to use menus and keyboard shortcuts instead.) If you’re on a laptop, I recommend either hiding the main toolbar or setting it to Icon Only view to save screen real estate.Finally, some bugs that existed in Excel 2004 remain in the new version. So the Standard toolbar appears in every worksheet, instead of appearing just once. The Standard toolbar isn’t free-floating as it is in Excel 2004, but anchored within the spreadsheet window—and it cannot be undocked. And if you rely on macros, you really can’t upgrade unless you’re also an AppleScript wizard and willing to recode all of your macros.Excel 2008’s major draw is its Intel- and PowerPC-native code beyond that, though, there just aren’t that many new features, and, of the features that are new, none truly stand out. (Panergy’s $20 docXConverter can translate such files.) If you’re happy with the features and performance of Excel 2004, though, there’s no need to jump up to Excel 2008 right away. Xlsx format, you’ll have to upgrade as well—there are no file format converters for Excel 2004, as there are for Word and PowerPoint. Additionally, if you receive files in the new. Basically, if you’ve used Excel 2004, you’ve used Excel 2008.If you absolutely require Intel-native code on your Mac, or you find Excel 2004 runs too slowly on your Intel-powered Mac, then obviously you should upgrade. While Microsoft faced a huge amount of work to rewrite Excel as a Universal application for Intel and PowerPC Macs, the end result is somewhat disappointing for this end user.
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