Worksheets and Presentation grew up in two days

There is a stage every office suite goes through where it opens files well and edits them carefully, and still cannot do the ordinary things you would build a workbook or a deck with. The eleven releases between 1.16 and 1.25 were mostly about getting Worksheets and Presentation past that stage. What they did to Rutba Word is its own post.

First, a large workbook that scrolls

On a sheet of sixty thousand rows, drawing one frame took a third of a second — three seconds where the file gave every row its own height — so a flick of the wheel queued a dozen frames and the rows you scrolled to stayed blank until the grid caught up. It is thirty milliseconds now, fifty with a height on every row, and ten rows are drawn beyond the edge in each direction so the next ones are already there.

Worksheets

• Sheets come and go from the tabs. A + at the end adds one; a tab’s menu renames or deletes it. A workbook used to keep exactly the sheets it opened with.
• A block of cells becomes a table — a header row, banded rows if you ask, and a style Excel knows by name — from one cell or a selection.
• Frozen panes stay put: the rows under the headings and the columns beside them stay on screen, as Excel keeps them, while the rest scrolls.
• The Data tab works: sort by up to three columns through a dialog, Text to Columns, and Remove Duplicates.
• The Formulas tab works: Trace Precedents and Trace Dependents draw their arrows on the grid, and Create from Selection names each column of a block from its header.
• Notes and pictures go on cells: a note with Shift+F2, and a picture from a file at the cell, at its own proportions.
• Printing is yours to set: the selection becomes the print area, and the Page Layout tab now writes the file’s own margins, orientation and size — with print titles, scale to fit, page breaks, and a header and footer on every printed page.

The Page Layout tab deserves its own sentence. Before 1.21, Margins, Orientation and Size changed a setting in the window that nothing read, so a workbook printed the way it always had whatever you chose. It writes the file now, where the print dialog — and Excel — start from.

Presentation

• The Format Painter carries one shape’s fill, outline and font to the next shape you click.
• The footer band: Header & Footer, Date & Time and Slide Number, on one slide or every slide, the number following a slide when slides move.
• Find and replace across the deck: every shape the words appear on, a match clicked goes to its slide, and Replace All rewrites them everywhere with each run keeping its look.
• Lists that behave: bullets, numbering, list levels and line spacing written as PowerPoint keeps them — and a slide keeps its bullets and bold words when its text is edited, which it previously did not.
• Shapes that move: cut, copy and paste between slides, a shadow from the ribbon, and a link on a shape’s words, followed with Ctrl+click.
• Text inside a box: alignment, text direction, columns, strikethrough, character spacing, change case and highlight, all written as PowerPoint keeps them and drawn on the stage.

Written the way the other suite keeps it

Wherever one of these changes the file, it is written the way Excel or PowerPoint writes it, not as a private note only Rutba Office reads. A table, a frozen pane or a slide footer that exists only in our window is a feature that vanishes the moment you send the file to somebody else — which is why the engine is held to files Office itself wrote.