Excel greys out all the options until I save

This is only the ribbon rubbish I alluded to a moment ago. I ignore it and use the proper menus.

Brian Gaff snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com wrote

You really should have persisted, they are by far the best way to do some stuff.

Yes, and among the worst ways to do some other stuff. They're good with (reasonably) determined numbers of things, such as months of the year or days of the month, less good with arbitrary quantities, particularly when the quantities runs into thousands.

A lot of people have small databases, but think they are spreadsheets. Use the right tool for the job, and learn spreadsheets but also learn databases. If you walk the dark path, MS Access is one of the finest bits of software they have ever produced (I know it's not a high bar).

Like what ?

Can you spell that out in more detail ?

Yep.

Yeah, its what I use myself for mine.

Main downside with it is that there aren't non MS close copys like there are with Excel with OpenOffice and LIbreOffice.

Once upon a time, before the Internet, the only way to find out your bank balance was to go to the hole in the wall and request it (still much better than before holes in the wall).

I wanted to simulate my account, which was quite busy, and things were basically mostly done by cheque. So I wanted to enter cheques as they were written, and have them deducted from my balance, in as near the way the bank did it as possible.

Not difficult to poke a cheque into a calendar, but it got a lot harder when more than one cheque/standing order happened on the same day, and to allow for weekends and bank holidays. It got so messy that I ripped most of it out and started writing Basic... but then it wasn't really a spreadsheet. A trivial job for a database.

How about a diary? An indefinite number of entries, unless you confine a sheet to a single month, or maybe a year, but you can't then search over a long period.

Or a parts list, when new parts are being called into use every day, year after year?

Anything extremely relational, such as an invoicing system, or service management system, again with an open-ended number of entries?

Indeed, and there never will be. Not enough demand, given the amount of work needed. LibreOffice Base might have improved since I used it last, but it was by far the buggiest application of the suite and the slowest to be developed. ODNC, indeed. It took a long time to get native MySQL support. The report writer kept dying, and on the last occasion I used it, I needed an invoice quickly. I ended up writing it in php and fpdf and carried on using that. All my database work now is in php. I have dabbled a bit with perl, but like C, that's a write-only language.

Definitely there in my Office 365. Hiding just above the ribbon.

Not that hard to do with vba in the spreadsheet.

OK.

Easy to do open ended, I do that with my car fuel records and misc spending like tires and batterys.

Click on "File" or "Home" and you get a drop-down menu.

I have several different versions of Office Pro from over the years (right back to v.4.3) and the menu systems are all similar.

Exactly.

No I don't. Well OK I do if I click on File, but that's the case in all applications. Clicking Home just makes the Home ribbon appear/disappear.

AISB I don't use the ribbon stuff.

agree .. and moving to Office 365 version made it even more convoluted.

That must make your life very difficult (unless you stuck with Office 2003).

My pet hate is that the charts in XY graph mode are still buggy and have crazy behaviour when facing some data that should be plottable. That was an "Improvement" that came in with Office 2007 and *still* isn't right!

They also broke the previously working (and quite good) polynomial fit in the graphs package to make it agree with the wrong answers given by the spreadsheet :( - that was fixed after many people complained.

I get a drop-down menu from each of those.

And this is the absolutest, up-to-datest, newest, singing-and-dancingest, not bought but effectively rented version.

I'm using Office 2016. I'd have stayed with Office 2008 but I needed a 64-bit version.

I have that. But when I wanted to shift it from PC to replacement PC, MS wouldn't authorise the product key.

I had that with Office Home and Student 2007. I bought it and the licence covered three machines. Many years after they discontinued it, they changed the authorisation system and it would only authorise one machine. However, I phoned Microsoft and pointed out the licence terms and they authorised the other two over the phone.

That is the modern tabbed button bar, *not* a menu.

The thing you get in the File tab, is *closer* but also not a menu (since it replaces the whole window content at the same time - it is not something that drops down from the menu bar over the existing content).

A menu is something that (generally[1]) uses the Win API menu components, and hence is consistent with all other applications that use menus. e.g:

Arguably this is not respecting the user since it forces them to switch paradigms between applications.

Screenshot please...

That is essentially what I'm referring to, although mine look a lot nicer because they're not Windows menus.