Transcript
In this demonstration, I’ll take you through a quick example of using Xcellerator. We’re starting with the simple spreadsheet already loaded into Excel, and we’re going to run Xcellerator on it. Before we begin though, you can expand this video to full screen by clicking on the icon in the bottom right hand corner of the video. First, let’s start Xcellerator. You can see that Xcellerator in Excel 2007 lives on the Incisive tab. So let’s click start, and this will run the three tests that we have selected at the moment on our spreadsheet. One of the tests has an error result that is shown in red. Let’s go ahead and click ‘Ok’ and get a closer look. Here you can see that before we do anything else, new things have happened on our spreadsheet: we have some colors on the cells, some reds and some yellows, as well as a task pane on the right hand side. In the task pane, there are two main areas: ‘Filters’ and ‘Results’. Let’s look at the ‘Filters’ first. Inside the filters, for every test that there were results, you have a checkbox, and you can turn on or off the display of those results. This can help you narrow down what’s displayed and help you focus on what you’re trying to solve. So let’s leave them all selected for now and go down into the ‘Results’. Here, we can look at the result we have: ‘Formula fails to cover area’, and click it. When you click it, we get an interactive dialog box or interactive speech bubble from that cell. This shows us the two results that we have. This speech bubble is interactive, so you can click on the result you want to read about. Here, when we select ‘Formula fails to cover area’, you see ‘This formula references part of a group of similar cells. Currently Referencing: (and has a range). And Selected References: (and another range). These ranges are clickable, so we can just click that, and see that currently references the small area with some sides left out, and it’s suggesting that it cover the entire range, and I’d have to agree with that. So what we can do is, even while we’re running Xcellerator, we can still interact with our spreadsheet, so we can correct this cell formula by expanding the reference cells, and clicking enter. We can rescan our spreadsheet to see if our errors have gone away by clicking ‘Rescan’, and you can see no more red cells, the error is corrected. We can also investigate the spreadsheet using the ‘Structure View’. When we click the ‘Structure/Test View’ toggle button, you can see that the task pane switches out, and we get some purple boxes around formula cells. When you select a formula cell, the cells that are referenced are highlighted in blue. This way, we can see that the formula references all of the cells that we have intended it to. We can switch back to the test view, and you can toggle back and forth between those at any time. Lastly, if you wanted to run some more tests, you can select more tests in the ‘Options’ dialog. And when you do select some more tests and hit ‘Ok’, Xcellerator will prompt you to rescan your spreadsheet again, this time applying all of the newly selected tests. And that will do it for our overview. Thank you for watching. You can get Xcellerator at www.incisive.com.