Illustration 1: To run the interactive spreadsheet, the browser you are using now must
have Internet Explorer 4.01 or higher according to Microsoft
Corporation. However, some people around the world are telling me that
they cannot run these illustrations unless they have upgraded to Office 2000
with at least the Internet Explorer 5.00 or higher that comes with the
Office 2000 upgrade. A few people with IE 5.00 and 5.01 stand alones
with having the Office 2000 upgrades reported problems in having the
spreadsheets appear in Illustrations 1-4. If
you see a spreadsheet in Illustration 1, you can test for interaction
in by
entering new data in Cells B11, B12, and/or B13.
Click here to view the Illustration 1 interactive spreadsheet.
Illustration 1 on Saving an Excel Workbook
as a Dynamic (Interactive) HTML File
Example
Note the chart below and then scroll down to the
table beneath the chart. Change the amount of the load to $300,000,000 and
then note how both the table and the chart change interactively even though you
are still in your browser rather than Excel.
Test for
interaction by entering new data in Cells B11, B12, and/or B13.
The above loan amortization table is for a real world loan from ten New York
banks to a copper mining company in Mexico. See the 133spans.xls file at
http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~rjensen/
Illustration 2 on Saving an
Excel
Chart as an Interactive HTML file
You must save (publish) each chart as a separate HTML file, and when you
save a workbook it does not automatically save any chart. You can,
however, create a new (master) HTML file and then copy in the Excel
workbook and copy in each chart to the master HTML file.
When you save a chart, it will add a spreadsheet, but the spreadsheet will
only include the data range that pertains to the chart. It will not
include cells that are outside the chart's data range.
If you have some cells that you would like included in the chart's
spreadsheet, you should add rows and columns within the chart's data
range. For example, in Illustration 2 below, the column for
"Gender" was not originally in the chart that I created.
When I discovered that this column did not appear in the chart's
spreadsheet, I added a blank column between the listing of the student name
column and the examination score column. Then I copied the
"Gender" column between the student names and their examination
scores. When I saved the chart below, it then included all three
columns in the chart's spreadsheet even though the "Gender" column
data was never declared in the chart's data range.
If you create macros, I cannot find any way to get them to run in the HTML
file. For example, the macro hot keys do not work. If you attach
a macro to a button, the button will not appear in the HTML file. For
example, in this simple illustration, the Excel workbook has two macros
called the "Female" and "Male." I then created the
macros and attached them to buttons on the Excel spreadsheet such that if
you clicked on the "Male" button, the macro filled the blue data
into the spreadsheet shown below. It also created the blue bar chart
shown below and created the blue text box in the chart. When I
clicked in the "Female" button, the "Female" macro
replaced all the male names, gender, and examination scores with female data
that appeared in red instead of blue. The text box also changed to red
and the contents of the text box in the chart then read "Female
Gender" in red. Unfortunately, the macro buttons in the Excel
chart will not get saved in the HTML version and the macros will not
run. I cannot change the data below into female data with the Female
macro.
A text box that reads "Male Gender" in blue
that was attached
to the original Excel chart did not get transferred into the HTML version of the
chart below. Hence, any text that you read must be part of the charts Title,
axes labels, or legend box. You cannot transfer text from a text box
that you added to the Excel chart.
I cannot get any attached objects such as
buttons, arrows, and text boxes to transfer to the HTML version. Also
recall that no macros will run in the DHTML version.
Note that you can change the names and examination score data
below. The chart will change accordingly
on-the-fly as you change the name and examination scores.
The Gender data was never part of the chart itself.