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Year 2000
notice: All LiveWebs Ltd products are Year 2000 compliant
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| MS Excel 2000 does an almost perfect job of
converting spreadsheets, so if you are an Excel 97 user today, what reasons are there for
purchasing LiveWebs rather than or in addition to Microsoft Office or Excel 2000, despite
the fact that LiveWebs publishes the most faithful
representation of your spreadsheets compared to any other package we know of? The
key reason is LiveWebs Markets, designed for
use with live-price based spreadsheets. But even if
you don't need LiveWebs Markets's scheduling capabilities, the reasons listed below detail
why you should consider it for normal spreadsheet publishing
jobs (e.g. updating monthly sales figures).
LiveWebs 2.0 is of course compatible for use with Excel 2000, and there
may even be situations where a user would want to use say LiveWebs Markets for publishing
Reuters-fed spreadsheets and Excel 2000 for 'static' once a month material, like sales
data. |
| Below are some reasons why you might consider trying out
LiveWebs before going full ahead with Excel 2000. Compared to Excel 2000,
LiveWebs (in our opinion):
 | is much easier
to use for web publishing; it's a straigtforward interface and it doesn't have versioning
issues. With LiveWebs, your spreadsheet stays a spreadsheet, and you can re-publish it
again and again, each time at the click of one button. With Excel 2000, there are so many
ways to slice the cake, it's easy to forget
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| which publishing method you've used |
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| whether you've actually turned your whole workbook into an HTML file |
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| where the files, and the slew of auxiliary files in subdirectories which Excel
2000 creates, are located |
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| which is your original file, particularly if you are using the interactive
components with colleagues |
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| can, with the LiveWebs Markets
version, publish automatically at timed intervals (minimum in
theory is 1 second)
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| is cheaper
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| provides a navigational
structure capability (LiveWebs automatic navigation bars for thematically related
material)
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| publishes better on older
browsers
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| produces much smaller HTML
files and hence these files are much quicker to download to your browser (very
important for LiveWebs Markets which causes web pages to self-refresh frequently)
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| employs the LiveWebs Cell
Merger Algorithm, which shares out empty cells amongst cells whose contents in the
resulting web page would otherwise cause the text to wrap down a line when not wanted.
Excel 2000 employs a similar methodology which does not appear to be as good in most
situations: in particular, Excel 2000 appears to have a real problem with right aligned
cells
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| allows ranges and graphs to be web published using a different default global font, global font size, table width, and
graph size
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| provides the 'Table Split'
construct for splitting a large spreadsheet into smaller onscreen chunks without
altering the spreadsheet
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| allows you to 'plant' custom
HTML code in your spreadsheet to be used in the web-published result
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| is quick and easy to install,
unlike Office 2000 is not a whole new environment (i.e. does not force you to do things
like upgrading to Internet Explorer 5)
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Click here for a full features list
Click here to
download a FREE evaluation version
Click here to
see an example of a LiveWebs conversion
On the other hand, Excel 2000:
| produces the most faithful result; web pages look
almost exactly the same as the spreadsheets they came from.
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| can now even publish a spreadsheet as a web page with
an interactive spreadsheet component built into it. The Excel spreadsheet is almost just
'cloaked' in the browser environment.
NB: Despite all this inbuilt web/spreadsheet
functionality, it is not possible to bring live price feeds from say Bloomberg or Reuters
into Excel-published web pages in the same way you normally would with a formula such as
'=BLP' etc. The impact of this is that spreadsheet components viewed even in IE5 cannot
have live-linked cells.
All the best functionality of Excel 2000 web publishing requires certain
pre-conditions to be true:
| if using any of the interactivity, you need to have
the Microsoft Office Server Extensions installed on the computer serving those web pages,
and everyone using those pages needs an Excel 2000 licence on their PC
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| whether using interactivity or not, you pretty much
need to use Internet Explorer 5 as your browser; you get increasingly worse results
viewing Excel 2000 generated pages the older the browser you are using. If you use graphs
in particular you are likely to get pretty unusable results, whilst LiveWebs publishes
well right down to Navigator 1.1 and Internet Explorer 2.0
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