Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Excel, the List Maker

After spending years loading up Excel with advanced number-crunchy features like pivot tables, database queries, and nested formulas, in 1999 Microsoft decided to step back and conduct some studies to see how its customers were enjoying their NASA-caliber spreadsheet program.

And what were 65 percent of Excel fans doing with all this power?

Making lists.

That’s right—most people use the software that drives uncounted businesses and statistical analyses for nothing more than building lists of phone numbers, CD collections, and so on.

That’s why Microsoft, which never met a feature it didn’t like, created the Macintosh-only List Manager, which simplifies building and manipulating lists (Figure 12-26). Excel does this by creating something called a list object, which is nothing more than a simple database. It’s made up of rows (which are the same as database records—that is, the individual “Rolodex cards” of an address database) and columns (which are like the fields in a database record—that is, the address, city, zip code, and other bits of information). These rows and columns are contained inside a list frame.

The List Manager has a number of features that improve upon using regular spreadsheet cells to store your lists (and upon Excel databases, as they were called long ago):

• The list frame, a special border that appears when you click a list object, clearly outlines your data. You don’t have to wonder which cells are meant to be part of the list.

  Figure 12-26. List ...