Excel Styles and Views

This is a great site. It reminds me of going from grade 8 to highschool. Grade 8, I was one of the big kids. The following year, I was one of the ??? At work, I'm the big grade 8'er. Here, just a kid.

Does anyone bother with using Excel styles? I don't ever read anything about them, so either they are completely self-explanatory, or no one is using them. I have a couple typical cell formats that I use, but I've never bothered to put them together in a style. I'm sure I'd save a bit of time.

Likewise, I've played some with views. I've set up several views in one spreadsheet, and just cycle through them to hide and filter a table. It can be really slow, and sometimes the views get confused. The only reason I continue to use them is that I consistently look at the same columns while doing a weekly review of our inventory status. Click View1 for some initial data. View2 unhides other columns and hides what I don't need so I can print a report to give someone else.

Somehow, these both seem to be good ideas that haven't fully been developed. 

Omar

Bit of a tough one to answer as features are very 'personal'. I find myself often saying, "Don't do it like that', but in fact, if you get it done, are comfortable and reasonably efficient, why change. I would say two things

1) Styles are great, but VERY underused. The one good thing about setting up styles is that you not only keep a set theme in your sheets, but you avoid the real danger in Excel of running into the 'too many cell formats' error, as each variation of colour, border, bold, etc is counted as a format and the threshold in versions before 2007 is very low in this regard. Setting styles, ensures a cell that looks like a total for example, is sure to be exactly the same as any other total style and count as one. In 2007, while the limit has increased, the themes and styles are much better organised and displayed. I use them all the time.

2) Views are similar and not very 'discoverable' but you are using them as intended. I used to use them a lot for weekly reports, but have now discovered Pivot Tables. This is something you should take a look at.

Looking forward to you getting to 'High School'

I used to use Views a lot, particularly in combination with the old Reports add-in (is this still available in Excel 2007?). However, I've found that the Views feature is incompatible with Tables in Excel 2007, so I'm waiting for that to be fixed in a future version.

 Steve

Styles are especially useful with complex workbooks. Like Nick said: it helps to avoid the too many different cell formats issue. But it also caters for:

- ease of maintenance
- Consistent formatting (look and feel)
- quick change of properties of sets of cells by changing their style (using VBA).

I'm still adjusting to my eldest being in 'Year 1' and not '2nd Year' so not sure about the difference between grade 8 and highschool but I get the gist and I'm totally with you on this.
Mooching around in this environment just reinforces how much there is still to learn

On the subject of 'Views'; I have found they do cause problems when a workbook is used by many folk. If someone saves it with a view applied and the next user has no views set up then the only way to show all the columns was to unhide everything which opens up all the helper columns and compromises the protection.

I'm sure someone will now tell me there's an 'UnApply View' function.

I've never been able to get Views working to my satisfaction.

To compensate, I have developed a "Pane Control" using Grouping of rows & columns,named ranges and some VBA. The layouts can be a litte tricky, but I can have a singe Module with all the code, set up the group and named ranges as local to any or multiple sheets, and its works well, and fast.

My practice has been to use a range on the sheet and format it to look like a button, rather than adding controls - they somehow move around if you aren't careful. I then have a worksheet selection event in the ThisWorkbook module which will detect and execute any Pane Collapse/Hide action

 ..."someone will now tell me there's an 'UnApply View' function"

I haven't found that, but I did set up a "Normal" view. However, I don't intend for anyone else to use the spreadsheet, so I haven't run into sharing problems. I also have the Custom Views box on my Menu bar beside the Help item for easy access.