Excel Annoyances

EXCEL 2003 MENU AND FUNCTION ANNOYANCES

CLOSE BUTTON IS UNAVAILABLE

The Annoyance:

I use Excel 2003 at work, where we also have the Novell GroupWise office collaboration package installed on our network. We installed GroupWise after Office, and as soon as we did, the Close button at the top-right corner of the Excel window went gray and quit responding. I can still choose File → Exit to quit Excel, but I prefer to use the Close box. Why is it unavailable?

ANOTHER GAME TO WHILE AWAY YOUR...UH...PERSONAL TIME

Remember the kid’s game of Connect 4? An Excel version is available from http://www.xl-logic.com/xl_files/games/connect4.zip (and shown in the following figure). Just download connect4.zip, unzip the file (it contains a single workbook), and start playing. You can play against another human or against a built-in neural network-based program that creator Guy Cartwright wrote for the game. Yes, there is a pattern you can follow to win every time when you have red and move first, but I challenge you to go beyond the pattern and test your wits against the program! I should note that the program code doesn’t find the winning sequence for red, even though it gets the first two moves right and the next move forcing victory is obvious to a human player.

Figure 9-7. This game is fun, but the code behind it is also interesting.

The Fix:

The problem, as I’m sure you figured out already, is a nasty ...