Off the top of my head, I can suggest you use template names which are as descriptive as possible. I can’t think of an easy way to keep your favorite templates anywhere in the ribbon. Now, if you want to learn some RibbonXML, you could put together something useful.

I will endeavor to persevere & no doubt I will get it done.

Thank you!

If you read this, can you take pity on a 2003 user and tell me how to do it?

Thanks!

You start up the recorder, select the connector, and drag an end somewhere new, to see how the ‘TOP’ property works. You don’t yet know that it’s called the ‘TOP’ property…that’s why you are firing up the macro recorder in the first place.

Then you go look at the blank macro you just recorded, and scratch your head. You do this several times. You record a change to a range instead of a shape, just to make sure the macro recorder is working (it is). You restart your PC to see if that makes a difference (it doesn’t).

You waste another half an hour on the help system…maybe because you dont know how to USE the help system effectively yet; maybe because the help system SUCKS. But you don’t know which ‘maybe’ is the major factor in your time wasting, because you don’t know what you don’t know. Although you suspect the latter.

You give up trying to learn by doing, and go surf the haystack of needles that is the internet, until you FINALLY find a great resource like this one that tells you “You sure picked a tough time to learn how to manipulate shapes boy, cause MS just FIRED THE TEACHER.

This is outrageous. I bought a PC mainly because Mac didnt have VBA, and this is my reward? Crap!

Yes, most VBA questions can be answered on the internet given a little time and good question phrasing. Therein lies the damn problem…

I don’t know what led to many of the design changes in 2007. I suspect a lot was having bitten off more than they could chew, and leaving half eaten features in the release.

I haven’t had time to work on the Goal Seek replacement feature for a while, but I’m planning a week or two of non-consulting, so I can fix up the blog and build some more utilities. I have much less time than ideas.

Microsoft appear to view this as a “seldom used feature” but they clearly did not consult with one of the world’s largest oil companies who use the feature extensively in a range of critical spreadsheets for determining officially-reported oil and gas reserves. The feature allows production decline curves to be easily manipulated (by shifting the end points of the curves) so that the curves fit through historic plotted production vs time data. When the curves are adjusted all of the associated reserves calculations are automatically updated.

I, and other colleagues, regularly write spreadsheets using this data fitting technique to solve a range of related technical engineering problems and we’re going to be lost without it. The company hasn’t moved to Office 2007 yet but when they do we’ll be crying out for the utility you’ve mentioned that you have started to work on. I hope you finish it.

Great website by the way. Always my first port of call for Excel-related queries.

A Class Module To Manipulate A Chart Series