Mac Forum / Applications / Excel / January 2006

Dear members:

Some of you here may not be old enough or remember but in the mid 80's when
Lotus 123 was the dominating spreadsheet on PCs running DOS there was a
competing spreadsheet application named "Lucid 3D". It had an interesting
feature and I am trying to find out if I can to the same (or something
similar) in Excel on the Mac. I am currently running Office V 2004 for the
Mac just to let everyone know as I am sure this information is relevant.

Lucid 3D allowed cells in a spreadsheet to display information coming from
another spreadsheet as if it had "depth". In other words a certain number or
value in a cell could be the product of a calculation performed by a
spreadsheet and the result would be placed in this cell. In case changes
were made to this spreadsheet the value would be updated accordingly. To
view the spreadsheet "behind" (or beneath depending on how you look at it)
this cell all that was required was for one to either double click on the
cell or select the appropriate command and the spreadsheet would open in
another window.

I am trying to do the same in Excel 2004 for the Mac. I have created a
spreadsheet that has become way too long and I wish to have it simplified. I
want to have cells display a general description for the contents of boxes
but also need to have access to a detailed description of the contents of
each box including weight and cost for each item as well as the overall
weight and cost for the entire box. I have looked at the note function but
found it to be way too simple for what I need and would prefer to also have
it formatted as a spreadsheet to be able to print the contents of each box
in a well-formatted and organized way.

Is there a function in Excel that would allow me to work with it in 3D
similar to what I have described ? How can this be done ?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Best regards,

Joseph Chamberlain