I love the way that technical blogs are a two-way channel: not only do I write about topics that other people can discover, I also find out about other things in the technical community.
I’ve just had a pingback from Jimmy Peña’s blog (thanks, Jimmy). As is the way, I had a quick browse around and saw this post. This points to Jan Karel Pieterse’s Excel Name Manager add-in. I haven’t done any more than download and point it quickly at the first workbook I could find, but it looks excellent. Something that’s always been lacking (and still is in 2007, despite the slightly improved dialog).
And the fact that it’s free makes it even better. Not because I’m mean (just Scottishly careful), but because it demonstrates the sharing mentality among the technical community which is one of the more encouraging aspects of modern life. Bravo!
I’ll second that. Name Manager is the one Excel add-in I now find indispensable – ok, I could probably work without it, but it’s now such an integral part of the design process for me that using the built-in Name Manager is just frustrating.
I particularly like the ‘list names’ feature – quick and easy time-stamped documentation.
NM is a key implementation and troubleshooting tool form me too.
Just to be complete: I developed Name Manager together with Charles Williams http://www.decisionmodels.com, so credits should go to Charles as well…