Pretty simple question

Hello

I use Excel 97 in work. I have a frustrating problem.

If I have two Excel workbooks open then, in order to switch between them, I
have to go to the menu bar and select <Window> and then the appropriate
workbook.

I am used to Excel 2000 where I can just click the workboook 'icons / tabs'
along the bottom of my screen. This is far better.

How can I change Excel 97 to allow the open workbooks to display as
icons/tabs along the bottom of the screen (as is standard these days).

Please help lower my blood pressure...

Regards


Alex

Good morning Alex

The short answer is, you can't. This feature was introduced in XL2000. If you want to cycle through your open worksheets rapidly, use this keyboard shortcut:

CTRL + Shift + F6

HTH

DominicB

Alex, I don't think that was an option in '97, you could use the keyboard
shortcut Ctrl+tab to switch between the open workbooks

--
Paul B
Always backup your data before trying something new
Please post any response to the newsgroups so others can benefit from it
Feedback on answers is always appreciated!
Using Excel 2002 & 2003

"Alex" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Hello
>
> I use Excel 97 in work. I have a frustrating problem.
>
> If I have two Excel workbooks open then, in order to switch between them,
I
> have to go to the menu bar and select <Window> and then the appropriate
> workbook.
>
> I am used to Excel 2000 where I can just click the workboook 'icons /
tabs'
> along the bottom of my screen. This is far better.
>
> How can I change Excel 97 to allow the open workbooks to display as
> icons/tabs along the bottom of the screen (as is standard these days).
>
> Please help lower my blood pressure...
>
> Regards
>
>
> Alex

Excel 97 does not have that feature. That feature wasn't available until
Excel 2000.

Me personally, I hate Excel 97 as it's way to unstable, even with the SR-2
patch. I rather use Lotus 1-2-3, v 2.3 than to use Excel 97. However,
Excel 2000 resolved a lot of issues that I hated about Excel 97. Here's 2
of the biggest issues that I had with Excel 97:

When I took one range divide by another range (I.e. Total Cost divide by
Total Quantity in a record format), and those ranges exceeded 25 cells each,
it would return the result of "1/0".

Another major issue that I had with Excel 97 was the Legend on the charts
would gradually move from where ever I had originally set it to be at all
the way to the top middle position of the chart for each time the numbers
that impacted the chart were manipulated (in this case production numbers),
printed, and saved. I ended up submitting a web help ticket on this. I
ended up submitting the text of my macro to them, so as they could figure it
out. They confirmed this to be a bug in Excel, said it was fixed in 2000,
and I asked them if it would be fixed in 97. They basically said no, it
wouldn't be fixed in 97, but what they did was sent me Office 2000 as a fix
to the bug, when Office 97 was still being supported. Don't expect this
from them as Office 97 is no longer supported by MS.

Once I got Office 2000 and installed it after removing Office 97 from the
system, and not even changing one single thing, my production reports on the
Excel side of things ran 3 times faster, and that's no joke as prior to the
version change, it took the Excel side 1.5 hours to run, even with it in
manual calculation mode and the code calculating based on sheet by sheet.
After the version change, it only took 30 minutes to run that same set of
codes on the same computer, and no hardware spec change on the computer.

Also, if you have some computers with Office 97, and others with Office
2000, you may run into issues of code running in Office 97. That's cause
with Office 2000, the compilation of code has been changed so dramatically
that I have had some older code of Office 97, which then was used in Office
2000, and when it was to be used in Office 97 again, the code didn't run as
was expected. The main reason I got was due to this major compilation
change that took place.

Now for Office 2000, Office XP, and Office 2003, I can't say there's that
much of a difference between the 3 versions, but there is a far cry
difference between Office 97 and Office 2000.

For Access, there's some issues that I have had to deal with in Office 2000,
and those same issues has not been addressed even as late as Office 2003.
However, that's another application, and not for this newsgroup. I only
mentioned as another indicator that there's not much difference between
Office 2000 and Office 2003. The MSQuery within Excel don't work worth
anything as it caused my programs to crash due to memory leaks, so I don't
even bother with MSQuery, not to mention that it has never worked out all
that great anyhow, so as far as that part of Excel is concerned, in my
opinion, it's very unstable. I use macros instead and avoid the ADO stuff
within the Excel macro world as that causes memory leaks as well.

--
Ronald R. Dodge, Jr.
Production Statistician
Master MOUS 2000

"Alex" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Hello
>
> I use Excel 97 in work. I have a frustrating problem.
>
> If I have two Excel workbooks open then, in order to switch between them,
I
> have to go to the menu bar and select <Window> and then the appropriate
> workbook.
>
> I am used to Excel 2000 where I can just click the workboook 'icons /
tabs'
> along the bottom of my screen. This is far better.
>
> How can I change Excel 97 to allow the open workbooks to display as
> icons/tabs along the bottom of the screen (as is standard these days).
>
> Please help lower my blood pressure...
>
> Regards
>
>
> Alex