Tag: spreadsheet activex control

  • Interactive Tooltips on Excel Worksheets

    The Next Level of Tooltips on Excel Worksheets: Taking Advantage of the ActiveX Spreadsheet Control

    Marchant mechanical calculating machine - Photographer: Ian's Shutter Habit (flickr.com)Tooltips are one of the most helpful features when prospecting large data sets.

    We already had a couple of articles talking about tooltips, on charts and on worksheets:

    Tooltips on Microsoft Excel Tables

    Charts in Excel Table Tooltips

    Display all Fields of a Row in large Excel Tables

    Better Chart Tooltips with Microsoft Excel 2010

    Today’s post is trying to take this to the next level: an interactive tooltip on a Microsoft Excel worksheet. You may ask:

    “What the heck is an interactive tooltip?”

    What I am thinking of is a tooltip enabling you not only to read additional information but also interact with it. E.g. copy data from the tooltip and paste it somewhere else, do side calculations based on the currently selected data, browse through a longer list of data in the tooltip, etc.

    Impossible? No it isn’t. Microsoft provides a very useful ActiveX control which enables us to do exactly this: the Microsoft Office Spreadsheet Control. Today’s post shows how to take advantage of this ActiveX control in order to provide an interactive tooltip on Excel worksheets – as always including the Excel workbook for free download.

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