New Cell Styles

[Steve...]

Can anyone enlighten me as to the purpose of the "Good,Bad and Neutral"
formating in Cell Styles and also the "Data and Model" formatting?
Thanks...........

 

[Bernard Liengme]

In XL2007, Microsoft has provided some suggest colours schemes that seem to
go together in a theme.
Suppose you have monthly sales; maybe you want to colour good months with
one colour and bad with another.
Date and Model are similar. One can use one colour for cell with formulas
(calculations); another for raw data.

All that is being offered is a palette of colours; it is up to the user to
decide if and when to use them.

best wishes

 

[Steve...]

Hi Bernard and thanks for the reply.
I sort of guessed it was something along those lines but was surprised
because the feature seems to have such prominence when viewed on a reasonably
high resolution screen and was not a feature in the 2003 version, at least I
don’t think it was.
I am very quickly getting to like this new ‘Ribbon’ system but again this
feature seems prominent on my machine and I have at least a quarter of the
ribbon (Home Ribbon) showing this feature when the program is expanded full
screen. I just thought it must therefore have a higher importance than I
guess it does.
Thanks again…….
Steve…..

 

[Nick Hodge]

Steve

Expanding on Bernard's reply. The objective of the ribbon was to help
'average' users produce great looking documents, quickly...job done.

For experienced or 'power' users the ribbon is a bit more of a steep curve
as often the last thing in those peoples mind is pretty formatting, (ex
charts), it the right answer and the data.

I agree, some features are given more prominence than they perhaps deserve,
but being a data, not design guy, I'm actually stating to get pretty data
too ;-)

--
HTH
Nick Hodge
Microsoft MVP - Excel
Southampton, England
(e-mail address removed)
web: www.nickhodge.co.uk
blog: www.nickhodge.co.uk/blog/

FREE UK OFFICE USER GROUP MEETING, MS READING, 27th APRIL 2007
www.officeusergroup.co.uk

 

[Steve...]

Hi Nick and thanks for your reply…
I think you are absolutely spot on and I could not figure why there was this
prominence to the formatting I referred to and also I did not realise that
the ones in question, “Good, Bad, and Neutral†were just examples bundled as
the default and presumberly Microsoft’s best guess as to what users might
want to use them for. I was not aware initially that they are fully
customisable. I wondered why they would give prominence to some kind of
format/audit colouring system and thought I was missing something!
As you suggest, we have always focussed on the numbers but as the day has
progressed (the family are out for the day) I have also produced some more
colourful numbers. Who knows, I may even fire up ‘Publisher’ next !
Thanks again Nick……..