Excel to Works

[sjoans]

How do I get my excel worksheet into the Microscoft Works
Spreadsheet

 

[Don Guillett]

Carefully - Very Carefully. <g>
Sorry about the attempt at humor. AFAIK you don't. & why would you want to?
If it's for someone who doesn't have excel, they can download the free
viewer from ms.

 

[Frank Kabel]

Hi
MS Works should be able to open Excel files. You may loose some
formulas, formating, etc.

 

[Ken Wright]

Just open it as you would any other file - One of the options is to open *.xl*
files which are Excel files, BUT, downside is that Works is very much reduced in
functionality compared to Excel and you will have trouble importing any
complicated formulas, or more than one sheet at a time etc. Basically just have
to try it and see what you get, but just don't expect a copy of Excel in
Works!!!

 

[Don Guillett]

Just goes to show how much I know. I should keep my mouth shut since I don't
have works on this computer.

 

[Harlan Grove]

...
...

. . . but just don't expect a copy of Excel in Works!!!

...

Too true. In the off chance the OP needs to work with nontrivial .XLS files but
doesn't want to shell out for Excel or Office, there are alternatives that are
cheaper and just a bit more capable than Works. See

http://www.google.com/[email protected]

OpenOffice and ThinkFree through ProPack can handle multiple worksheet .XLS
files. Of these, only OpenOffice handles multiple open workbooks well. That
said, it may still be possible to buy legal copies of Office 2K on auction
sites. While I can see the point to buying Office, I have to say I can think of
no good reason to waste storage (not to mention money) on Works.

 

[Ken Wright]

no good reason to waste storage (not to mention money) on Works.

other than that certain versions appear to be a valid media for upgrade pricing
qualification for Office or Excel

 

[Harlan Grove]

other than that certain versions appear to be a valid media for
upgrade pricing qualification for Office or Excel

....

You mean if you lack a third cousin's step child to claim for the student
pricing option?

All things considered, I'd much prefer MSFT losing a large chunk of the
market to OpenOffice and StarOffice (even better, to Gnome Office) and be
forced to return to the 'competitive Upgrade' (read: predatory) pricing of
about a decade ago when owning any of the major spreadsheets qualified one
for upgrades to any other at about US$100.

That said, I don't use Excel for stats, so for me the improvements in its
stats functions are a big ho hum, ditto regression & simulation. At the
moment I use XL8/97 at work and XL9/2K at home, and I dread the scheduled
rollout of XL10/2002 at work later this year. Other than the quantum leap in
functionality provided by colored worksheet tabs in XL10/2002, I can't think
of any compelling reason to upgrade from XL9/2K. So . . . if the OP can find
a cheap copy of Office 2000, that may well be the best of all options.

If Microsoft ever develops a spreadsheet that

1. has at least as many columns as there days in a leap year,

2. can have C:\foo\bar.xls and X:\Y\Z\bar.xls open in the same instance at
the same time,

3. learns from StarOffice/OpenOffice that DDE calls can be implemented with
the syntax of function calls rather than hardcoded DDE command expressions,

4. adds any dozen of the functions in Longre's MOREFUNC.XLL as built-in
worksheet functions (aside from MDETERM.EXT and MINVERSE.EXT, for which
there's no excuse for such functionality not *ALREADY* being part of Excel),

5. extends the CELL function to return formatting information such as text
and background colors, which 123's @CELL has been able to do for over a
decade now,

6. either extends SUMIF/COUNTIF to handle multiple, nontrivial criteria and
arrays as well as ranges or implements a simple way to set up tables with
field names for use with SQL.REQUEST (gosh, maybe even think about rewriting
SQL.REQUEST in VBA rather than XLM, or even make it an XLL),

7. adds true regular expression support to Edit > Find/Replace, Data > Text
to Columns, FIND(), SEARCH(), MATCH(), {V|H}LOOKUP, DSUM etc. like
OpenOffice/StarOffice already provide,

8. DOCUMENTS what exactly the object returned by

OFFSET(Range,{0;1;2},{0,1},1,1)

is (and makes it possible to pass such beasts to and return them from udfs)
[this is a plea for better documentation in general, including correction of
long-standing errors in online help],

9. makes 3D references part of Excel's object model so that they can also be
passed to and returned from UDFs.

I could go on, but these are what I'd consider a minimal list of new
features that'd make for a compelling upgrade. Until all governments east of
the Urals and south of the Yucatan peninsula and the Mediterranean Sea adopt
OpenOffice or StarOffice for use on all of their PCs, I doubt MSFT would get
off their collective, monopolistic butts to tackle any of the items above
(except, perhaps, for #8, which doesn't actually require any coding work,
but does assume someone there knows what this mysterious type really is).
I'd bet blinking text is added to Excel before any of the 9 items above.

To be fair, I'm not an ideal Office customer. I don't use Word or PowerPoint
if I can help it. When I do use them, it's usually to open documents and
print them to .PDF files so I can then delete the .DOC and .PPT files. The
company I work for uses Lotus Notes, so I'm blessed by having no contact
with Outlook, Exchange etc. I use Excel and Access as analytical tools, I
create as few 'documents' as possible. SmartTags and Task Pains strike me as
Clippy's Revenge.

 

[Ken Wright]

LOL - Agreed almost 100% Harlan.

You mean if you lack a third cousin's step child to claim for the student
pricing option?

and the licence now allows you to install that copy on up to 3 machines in the
house, which I think makes that excellent value for money.

forced to return to the 'competitive Upgrade' (read: predatory) pricing of

sigh - the good old days :-(

functionality provided by colored worksheet tabs in XL10/2002

OK I admit it, I like coloured worksheet tabs - Always used them in Lotus and
was extremely ticked off to find Excel didn't have them. Really helps me
organise multi-tabbed files so searching for and grouping similar sheets is easy
on the eye, but I can understand it not being everyones cup of tea.

I'd bet blinking text is added to Excel before any of the 9 items above.

God forbid it should happen, but unfortunately I probably agree with you on that
one.


All that aside, and not that it is likely to make any difference to the OP given
that the spreadsheets are coming from Works, but I would have thought the
enhanced memory management referred to by Charles Williams would be of some use
to you given the complexity of some of the stuff you deal with:-

http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsc.htm

Excel 95, Excel 97 and Excel 2000 are officially limited to 64MB of formula
memory for workbooks (heap space).
Excel 2002 is officially limited to 128MB of formula memory for workbooks (heap
space).
Excel 2003 has a substantially increased memory capacity which may be in excess
of 1 gigabyte

And lastly, lame as it may sound, I actually like the look of the new interface
from XP onwards, and anytime I go back to 2000, it really does seem somewhat
tired by comparison. Fluffy Bunny stuff I know, but what can I say, I like the
'flat' effect of the sheet and coloured tabs

 

[Harlan Grove]

...
...

All that aside, and not that it is likely to make any difference to the OP
given that the spreadsheets are coming from Works, but I would have thought
the enhanced memory management referred to by Charles Williams would be of
some use to you given the complexity of some of the stuff you deal with:-

http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsc.htm

Excel 95, Excel 97 and Excel 2000 are officially limited to 64MB of formula
memory for workbooks (heap space).
Excel 2002 is officially limited to 128MB of formula memory for workbooks (heap
space).
Excel 2003 has a substantially increased memory capacity which may be in excess
of 1 gigabyte

Yikes! IMHO, anyone using spreadsheets that require more than 10MB disk storage
should be shot. [I'm not a warm & fuzzy sort.] Anything larger than that either
screams to be rewritten as something FAR MORE MODULAR or it should have been
converted into a database app years ago. As for using multiple workbooks that
consume more than 64MB disk space, that is a potential debugging nightmare that
I'd recommend any sane person avoid.

Spreadsheets are best when small. Large spreadsheet models can invariably be
improved by being rewritten in almost any other application development
platform. Besides, the improved memory model just means MSFT crippled the older
versions by imposing a fixed heap. That said, I'm happy enough living withing
64MB since none of the computers I use have more than 128MB RAM.

And lastly, lame as it may sound, I actually like the look of the new interface
from XP onwards, and anytime I go back to 2000, it really does seem somewhat
tired by comparison. Fluffy Bunny stuff I know, but what can I say, I like the
'flat' effect of the sheet and coloured tabs

And I prefer the look & feel of Linux's WindowMaker, but I'm forced to use
Windows at work and at home (if I want to use my wife's machine with the DSL
connection). The other home PC, which my children use, runs Windows XP Home. I
definitely don't like the interface. Mac OS X's Aqua is better but a bit too
much like CDE/Xfce.

Again, I doubt I'm typical. I have only 10 desktop icons in a single column on
the left side of my screen (of which 5 are Exporer icons to remote LAN folders
for which I don't bother to map drives and am too lazy to type full UNC
pathnames), as few icons in my task tray as possible, and many levels of menus
under Start. If I want quick access to apps, I hold down the Windows logo key,
press R and type in a command line. The best GUI is a minimalist GUI.