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Our updating policy has changed as of 1/1/2008. Before you read ours, please note that everyone else in the biz does the same thing - which is making things expire annually so they can suck more money out of you. NaviPlan, Profiles, all of the MoneyWhatevers, charge 100% each year. So every year, it's the same $1,000 - $1,750 charge. Some vendors charge 50%. We charge only 25%. Ask MS Money, which recently went out of business, why vendors in this biz needs to charge annually. The new policy is as follows: The MS Excel parts of the financial plan software will work for one year. After that, it will expire. Update costs are 25% of what's shown on the bottom of the product pages or price list. Only the Excel spreadsheets expire. The old policy was that you didn't have to pay again to reactivate when a spreadsheet expired. This may still apply if you bought before 2008, but you'll get the some old version that you originally purchased reactivated. So it won't have any of the new features nor bug fixes since then. To reactivate your old program(s), first zip / compress it, then e-mail it back (using the same e-mail address used when you bought it). It may be reactivated for another year for free, and e-mailed back to you. Because of problems with very old programs, some products won't be reactivated for free. Please don't send programs without asking if it can be reactivated first. Please note that e-mails sent to us over 3MB will be automatically deleted by the server. So ensure that you zip the file first, and then check before sending that the total e-mail is less than 3MB. How to Zip/compress an Excel Spreadsheet In Excel versions before 2007, go to Tools, Protection, Unprotect Workbook. In Excel 2007, protection is under the Review tab. If it asks you for a password, then let us know, and may be able to send you a reactivated spreadsheet that was backed up in the month of your purchase. Open Windows Explorer (right click on Start and choose Explore). Find the spreadsheet. Right click on it, and choose Send To. Then choose Compressed (zipped) Folder. This will zip / compress the spreadsheet to a manageable size. E-mail the file(s) with the zip extension. Ensure the total size of each e-mail is not more than 3MB. How to Update Old Spreadsheets with Client Data into New Version It only takes a minute or two to update an old client's program to the new one. Here's how to do that. A program expiring did not do anything to harm the input data of the old workbook, nor the charts/graphs. First, another method is to just put screen prints of your input into a Wood doc. Just get input on your screen, like the image below, then press the Print Screen key. This copies what's on your monitor onto the Windows clipboard. Then open a new Word doc; paste and the image is there. Then do a Page Break, and continue until all of your input is in the doc. Then use it to duplicate input into the new program. Then you won't have to do any of the following steps. When you have both old and new open at the same time (which means you may have to rename the old version first). If the old and new workbooks have the same file names, then first rename the old one to be something else. Open both the old and new workbooks. Go to the main input sheet on both. A tip to switch between open workbooks in Excel is to press Control Tab. The goal of all of this is to copy and then use the Paste Special feature to get the old input data into the new workbook. Here is Dual RWR's Master Input sheet as an example:
The range A11:A27 was highlighted. When input cells are all together like this, it's much faster to copy and paste them in chunks. If you would have tried to copy A10:A27, then you'd get an error because then you'd be pasting to cell D10, which is a protected non-input cell. Only copy and paste into green or gray input cells. On input and calculation sheets, if you try to paste to a protected cell, you'll get an error (and nothing will paste). Now go to Window and switch to the new program (or press Control Tab). Go to cell A11. Do not just paste! The reason is that the newer programs use input validation, which give you meaningful error messages and tell you what you did wrong and how to fix it, when you make a mistake. Right click and choose Paste Special, and then choose Values. This will paste just the values of the cells, and won't overwrite any of the formats or validations. Another Excel design flaw is that the validations should not paste into protected sheets, even though the cell is unprotected, but they do. When input cells are not together, like in the image below, then you'll have to do it one cell at a time. Here just cell AZ17 was copied.
Be sure to copy and paste ALL input cells into the new program, everywhere, including all of the manual overrides! If you didn't modify any of the presentation sheets, then this is all you have to do. The old workbook now is useless and can be deleted as long as you saved the new one. Now change inputted ages everywhere it asks for it because people are usually another year older when this happens (you would have had to do this with the old one too, even if it didn't expire). Change the current year if needed (you would have had to do this with the old one too even if it didn't expire). If you try to paste into cells that are not green (or gray) then you will get the protection error. Next, how to get the modifications you made on presentation sheets from the old program to the new one: The biggest error here is that people forget to unprotect the sheet first. The presentation sheets may be protected, but there is no password, so you can just go to Tools (or Review in Excel 2007), Protection, Unprotect sheet. So first, make sure both the old and new versions are not protected. Go to cell A1 the new version. Press Control A to select everything, and then go to Edit, Clear, All. This will delete everything, but some graphs you don't want, or have modified, may stick around. If you want them, then don't delete them. If you don't, then click on each graph to select it and then press the delete key as many times as it takes until it's gone. Repeat until everything is gone. Go back to cell A1 on the new version. Go to cell A1 of the old version. Press Control A to select everything. Then press Control C to copy. Go to the new version, and press Control V to paste. Ensure you're still on cell A1. You may want to manually copy and paste each modified graph into the new version. If you do, then there is a major Excel design flaw: It's still going to reference the data on the old workbook. It's a flaw because it should ask you which workbook you want the data to come from beforehand. The images below first show the old version, and then the new. When the top left graph was copied into the new workbook, the formulas still reference the old one (too small to see).
You need to change them to reference the new version. Here's how to do that if it's just one graph: If it's more than one, then the best thing to do is to edit the links. First make sure the sheet and workbook are not protected. Go to Edit, Links (this is under the Data tab in Excel 2007). Click on the external link that points to the old workbook. Click Change Source. Now browse until you find the new workbook, and then choose that. Now all of the external links will point to the new workbook instead of the old one. First regular left click on the graph. Then press the up or down arrow key until you see the formula like in the image above. For the old version, it looks like this: =SERIES('Annual Summary Numbers'!$F$6,('Annual Summary Numbers'!$A$8:$A$40,'Annual Summary Numbers'!$A$47:$A$70),('Annual Summary Numbers'!$F$8:$F$40,'Annual Summary Numbers'!$F$47:$F$70),1) The formulas in the new version look like this: =SERIES('[Dual RWR with demo data.xls]Annual Summary Numbers'!$F$6,('[Dual RWR with demo data.xls]Annual Summary Numbers'!$A$8:$A$40,'[Dual RWR with demo data.xls]Annual Summary Numbers'!$A$47:$A$70),('[Dual RWR with demo data.xls]Annual Summary Numbers'!$F$8:$F$40,'[Dual RWR with demo data.xls]Annual Summary Numbers'!$F$47:$F$70),1) All you need to do is copy and paste them from the old one into the new one (assuming you didn't change the sheet names of the sheet where it's getting its data from). So highlight the whole formula, then copy, go to the new one, delete, then paste. The thing to keep in mind is that you'll need to do this for each series in the chart. A series is data that makes up something in the cart. In the images above, there are two series, one for the purple and one for the blue areas of data. You scroll through the series by pressing the up or down arrow when you're inside a chart. Be sure that you copy and paste the correct old version's series into the new version. The way to tell is the very last number in the formula, in this case this is series 1. Keep in mind that you only have to do this when you've modified a chart and want to use it in the new version. If you didn't delete the new charts, then they should work just like the old ones (probably better as things always improve). If your modification was simple to an existing chart, then you can probably get away with just copying and pasting the chart formulas from the old one to the new one. We hope this helps. Please comment if you don't understand, something is missing in this section that needs to be covered, something needs to be clarified, etc. |
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