Free Excel Update
Barton Ostby
I just spent two hours on an excel file only to have excel crash before i saved it and lost my work. I am using MS Excel 97-2004 on a MacBook Pro and right now have to manually save all work. How can I set up MS Excel/Word/PPT to auto save every 10 minutes to my Business's Dropbox account? I want to be able to work without having to manually save my file every few minutes.
There isn't a way for Dropbox to do this but as I understand it there is an auto-save feature in Microsoft Excel. I believe most versions have this. Take a look at this article -us/article/use-autosave-and-autorecover-to-help-protect-your-files-in-...
If you're referring to auto-saving directly to your Dropbox account then it's very likely that Microsoft prevents that as a way to force OneDrive use. There are even topics on Microsoft's forums that discuss this, and the usual answer is to use OneDrive.
However, the auto-save feature just needs a folder on your computer, and you can easily specify your local Dropbox folder. Any files that are auto-saved to the Dropbox folder are then synced like any other file would be. I have my local Dropbox specified as the auto-save location in Excel and it's never been an issue.
The floating Dropbox logo is the Dropbox Badge. It doesn't allow simultaneous editing, but does alert you when others are in the document and it allows you to load the latest changes if any, among other things. Simultaneous editing is possible and has been for a long time through the Dropbox website (the same way Google Docs does it).
I keep my excel worksheets in "Page Layout" mode when I work, I find it best when I plan to print the document in the end. In the last 2 weeks, none of the documents I've printed are coming out the way they appear on the workbook.
@SergeiBaklan You legend! I have been having issues with printing to PDFs on two of nine PCs for months if not years. I was having to get other people in the office to print certain (not all) spreadsheets to PDF for me. This solved the issue for me. Thanks!
One of the places I learn the most is a group chat I have with my friends Dror Poleg and Ben Rollert. Dror, who writes about the history and future of work, cities, and finance, and Ben, who is the founder and CEO of Composer, are two of the smartest people I know.
Second, Gates and Raikes decided that they needed to take advantage of the graphical interface, so they switched mid-project from building for the PC, which was operated via command line interface, to building exclusively for Mac.
Excel is declarative in that you define what you want by typing a formula, without having to worry about how to perform the step-by-step computations. I can calculate the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) on an investment without needing to know the formula, let alone how to program it. I just type =IRR(C4:G4) and voila!
By operating at a very high level of abstraction, an Excel user is spared the headache of dealing with a lot of minutiae and incidental detail that is intimidating and frankly uninteresting to most people. Instead, Microsoft assigns an army of well-compensated developers to worry about the details, and the user just has to pick the right function to use.
Excel leverages a mental model that has been deeply ingrained in our culture for decades: a two dimensional grid using A1 notation. By assigning rows with numbers and columns with letters, a user can identify a single cell in a large 2D grid without confusion or ambiguity. By sticking to the same conceptual model that has been in use since at least 1979, people can understand how Excel arranges data without learning anything new.
One of the most magical aspects of Excel is that it is reactive. When you change an input to a formula in Excel, any output that depends on that input is automatically updated. Because Excel has been with us for so long, we take this property for granted. But most conventional programming languages are not like this: when an input is changed, each step that depends on that input needs to be deliberately re-run for the output to reflect the change.
By being reactive, Excel allows for a kind of playful interactivity. You can play with inputs and toggles to a workbook, simulating different hypothetical scenarios. For the insatiability curious, it can be downright addictive. But more than anything, reactivity makes it easy to get very fast feedback, and the faster a system provides feedback, the easier it is to understand how that system works. Excel is designed to optimize the speed at which its users develop skill at operating it.
Another piece of Excel magic is the ability to inspect and manually update the entries of a database contained in a sheet. This is just not the norm with most databases, which typically require developer skills and permissions of a database administrator to update.
That creates an emergent product roadmap for the B2B software industry. Instead of needing to sit in a room and think up the future, a couple generations of observant entrepreneurs simply watched what people were cooking up in spreadsheets, sized the market, and built dedicated, less flexible tools for each specific use case.
Inspired by Excel software products let users flexibly build on top of them the way that Excel users do. Instead of picking off specific use cases like Excel Unbundlers, they take inspiration from how Excel is built. They, like Excel, aim to create powerful general purpose, highly flexible software targeted at a broad audience, including non-technical users.
Likewise, a design principle for developers is to make any one piece of software really good at one specific thing, deliberately constraining its capabilities to a specific domain. Excel is a truly remarkable exception to this rule - it is something of a choose-a-phone, and clearly hundreds of millions of people do want to compose for it.
Bubble is a no-code website builder that lets non-programmers build production ready web apps, including robust back-ends and databases. It was literally inspired by Excel -- a builder can create a Bubble app by making a spreadsheet and linking it to Bubble.
Composer allows the end-user to build custom, automated investment strategies, all without writing a line of code. Composer is flexible enough that it is intended to allow the user to create strategies that the founding team never anticipated. Before Composer, a strategy creator would need to be fluent in Python or a similar language to harness this degree of flexibility, severely limiting the number of people who could implement their ideas. At the same time, the team is constantly refining the usability of the product based on countless hours of customer research, leaning on the strengths of their product designer, Mikael, and cognitive scientist, Anja.
Zapier is a combinatorial multiplier that connects thousands of tools, like a series of codeless APIs, allowing for meta workflows across apps. With Zapier, any of the infinite things that an Excel user can create in a spreadsheet might trigger some action in Figma, Composer, or Weblow, or vice versa.
When the original Project Odyssey team set out to build Excel in 1985, they wanted to make it easy for users to perform calculations and create graphs. They could never have predicted the myriad ways over 750 million people would bend and expand the product. They just knew that the more flexible and usable they made it, the more possibilities they would create.
Similarly, this new batch of Inspired by Excel products will likely have unintended and magnificent consequences on the way that people create, build, calculate, and communicate for decades to come. Based simply on the exponential nature of these products, the impact of Inspired by Excel will dwarf the already massive impact of Unbundling Excel by orders of magnitude.
Excel has survived and thrived through the Spreadsheet Wars, the mobile revolution, and Unbundling of Excel. Excel is the bonsai tree of software: the more non-core use cases pruned off by unitasker products, the healthier it gets.
Backward Compatibility with Existing Models. By translating ways that humans are used to thinking and behaving into software, product designers can make learning curves for complex products more gradual and natural.
Product Architecture that gets better with more features. As more functionality and extensions are added to Excel, the better the product gets, because each new piece of functionality harmonizes with all the existing bits. This is as opposed to the many products that get worse with more features.
Great post! I'm an engineer and statistician who's forced to use products like Minitab and SPSS (Uggh!) but prefer the visibility of Excel. The one major limitation you failed to mention: < 1 million rows. Excel can't handle larger data. This is the only limitation that really matters.
I\u2019ve talked (and written) about Public.com before, so you know the deal. One part investing app, one part community where you can discuss business trends and companies you believe in.
Some of you might be looking for a new brokerage these days, so you should know that Public is making the process of transferring your portfolio over ridiculously easy. They\u2019re even covering the transfer fees from your old brokerage.
Ben, the most technical of the trio (followed by Dror, then me), also happens to be an excellent writer. In late February, he released The Composer Manifesto, to make the case for investing as a creative endeavor. It\u2019s tailor made for the two types of people who read Not Boring -- investors and tech people -- and you should read it:
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