subject: Next Version of Excel - Some Suggestions for Microsoft Excel 2011, 2012 or Beyond [print this page] Next Version of Excel - Some Suggestions for Microsoft Excel 2011, 2012 or Beyond
What would you like to see in the next version of Excel? We don't think sparklines and slicers (the two features introduced in Excel 2010) would have been top of anyone's list. So to give Microsoft a bit of a hand, we thought we'd complie a quick wish-list of ideas for Excel 2012 (or whenever the new version appears). So without any further ado, here goes!
Cell Attachments
At the moment you can attach comments to cells and display data validation messages when you click on them, but why stop there? Sometimes there's a whole story underlying the value that you type into a cell - or even a whole spreadsheet. How about the ability to right-click on a cell and choose to insert a document, presentation, Excel workbook or any other Microsoft Office document?
A user of the spreadsheet would then see that cells formatted in a certain way (perhaps with a MS Office logo displayed) could be double-clicked to display more details. Or if this is over the top (and we suspect it is), how about just being able to attach free format NotePad-type text documents?
Spreadsheet Maps
A sure sign that there is an unmet demand for a service is when there are lots of third-party add-ins offering it. Currently software like OAK (Opera Analysis Kit), Spreadsheet Professional and Spreadsheet Auditor allow you to create maps of spreadsheets, showing where ranges are, where unique formulae exist and possible anomalies.
So we'd like to see a new view for Excel, alongside print preview and normal view, called auditing view. Display this and you'd see a read-only map of a spreadsheet, with range names, precedents and dependents clearly marked.
Inherited Styles
Currently in Excel you can assign a style to a cell ora block of cells. For example, if you assign the "Important" style to a range of cells, perhaps it would make the cells appear in bold and in a larger typeface.
Why not take this one step further, as in Word? For example, you could specify an InputCell style to make cells appear unprotected and with a green background, and then an InputCell.Currency style to make a cell appear with all of these properties and with a currency number format too.
The main problem with this idea is making it easy enough to understand and use. We'd suggest having a look at Microsoft Word first, which shows how not to do it!
Multi-Dimensional Spreadsheets
This might be too much for the humble spreadsheet, but how about extending it to more dimensions? Suppose you want to view sales by month, region, manager and product. At the moment you can put months across the columns, regions down the rows, use multiple worksheets for the managers - but then where do the products go?
Historically, software applications like Holos, Express, MasterModeller and One-Up have provided the ability to create multi-dimensional spreadsheets; why not Excel?
These are all blue-sky ideas; but maybe someone from Redmond will read this and turn them into reality. We have many more thoughts where these came from!
