Upgrading Your Personal Workbook

When you upgrade to Excel 2007, you may wonder if you also have to upgrade to the new format for your Personal workbook. The short answer is that yes, you should upgrade, and there should be no backward compatibility issues in doing so.

The Personal.xls workbook has historically been used to store macros and customizations that you want shared among all the workbooks on the system. Barbara updated to Office 2007, but her company has dictated that files created in Excel 2007 be saved in Excel 2003 format since many of their clients have not yet upgraded. Barbara is wondering if she should continue to use Personal.xls as the personal macro workbook or copy all macros to Personal.xlsb.

Honestly, you can't make that choice in Excel 2007. If you are using the program, all of your macros that previously were stored in Personal.xls should be transferred to your new Personal.xlsb file. Why? Because the Personal.xlsb file is for use on your machine, so there is no issue of backward compatibility for your clients. Workbooks that you save in the older Excel 2003 format will continue to save just fine and be readable by your clients using the older version of Excel.

If, however, you have clients with whom you need to share the macros in your Personal.xlsb file, and they aren't using Excel 2007, then you will need to unhide the workbook and save it in the older format explicitly. It is this older format that you will save with them, and such saving will still not affect the Personal.xlsb file on your system.

Posted courtesy of Tips.Net

Specifying How Excel Interprets Percentages

When you enter a number into a cell that is formatted for percentages, Excel tries to figure out if there needs to be any adjustment to what you entered. This tip describes the problem and indicates how you can control the "figuring" that Excel does.

When you format a cell to display percentages, Excel assumes that whatever you enter into that cell in the future will be a percentage. Thus, if you enter the number.5, Excel translates the value as 50%. Likewise, if you enter .75, then Excel treats the value as 75%.

A potential problem comes into play, however, when you start to enter numbers greater than or equal to one. For instance, if you put in the number 12, do you mean 12% or 1200%? By default, Excel thinks you mean the latter. Excel includes a control that allows you to specify how you want it to interpret what you enter. If you want Excel to treat the value as 12% instead of 1200%, then you can follow these steps:

1. Click the Office button and then click on Excel Options. Excel displays the Excel Options dialog box.

2. At the left side of the dialog box, click Advanced. (Click here to see a related figure.)

3. Make sure the Enable Automatic Percent Entry check box is selected.

4. Click on OK

Posted courtesy of Tips.Net