Developer Tab
Eric is out for a few days, so there is going to be a temporary break in the compatibility posts (they will resume sometime next week). In the meantime, I thought I would quickly review a few tabs that I have not talked about yet and potentially one or two other items.
Today, I wanted to briefly review the Developer tab. As part of the general redesign of Office UI, a decision was taken that by default, features used primarily by solution developers would not be visible in the UI – they would be available on a separate tab, (the Developer tab) that the user could turn on and off. The toggle for this tab is in the Excel Options dialog (same for Word and PowerPoint).
Once the user has toggled the Developer tab on, they will see a seventh tab in Excel (at the end of the other tabs). The Developer tab has three “chunks” – one for code, one for controls, and one for XML.
Briefly, here is what is in each of those three chunks.
The Code Chunk
This chunk contains functionality related to writing VBA. The Visual basic button launches the Visual Basic editor. The Macros button launches the Macro dialog (no change from current versions), the Record Macro button does just that, and the Use Relative References button does, well, why don’t I just show you the “super tooltip”.
Finally, Macro Security brings up the appropriate page in the Trust Centre to configure macro security levels.
The Controls Chunk
The Controls chunk contains functionality related to putting ActiveX and Forms controls on your worksheet. Again, none of this functionality is new to Excel 2007, it is just nicely organized and presented in one place.
The XML Chunk
The XML chunk contains all the functionally related to working with XML files in Excel. (This feature was added in Excel 2003 – see here for a brief overview.) The feature has not changed in Excel 2007, but it is now included in all versions of Office (in Office 2003, it was only included in Office 2003 Professional, not the Standard edition).
