After a frustrating moment this morning, I found myself wishing for a feature in MS Office that just plain doesn't exist. The concept is fairly simple: Multiple document types in one office file.
Think of Excel. When you start a new spreadsheet, you get 3 sheets in a nice tab array. Most people use just one tab and I haven't found many other people that obsessively delete those 2 rogue tabs quite like I do, but anyway, those are just additional spreadsheets. Sure you can have some charts and graphs in there, but its still very limited.
Imagine that instead of being limited to spreadsheets, you could put in a word document as another tab. Some nice words to go along with your data sheet would be quite nice, wouldn't they?
Or how about the Visio Database layout strapped to the Access database its describing?
Maybe your next status meeting's Powerpoint slides paired up with your Project status?
How about 3 word documents about the same thing, or some mega combination of all office formats!
Why is this even necessary? "But wait," you might say, "I can just embed my excel into word if i want to!" Honestly, you're better off shooting yourself in the face than trying to effectively edit embedded office objects.
So what if these tabs could talk to each other? Like if figure 7 in your Word doc was a graph generated on tab 3. Then you can go to tab 3, change the data around there and your Word doc would have its graph automatically updated to represent the changed data.
Easy to implement: No
Powerful: Yes
Worth Doing: Definitely
Dear Billy G,
Get on this ASAP.
kthxbai
Love, Pete
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
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