IJMC Excel's Flight Of Fancy

                 IJMC - Excel's Flight Of Fancy

You wonder why Office 97 takes up so much space on your hard drive? Well, 
apparently the Doom-like easter egg in Excel 95 wasn't enough. Excel 97 
has a flight simulator of sorts built in...what will they think of next? 
Hmm, maybe a racing sim? That would be neat.                        -dave






Apparently the constant rain in Redmond has driven Bill's engineers to
obsessive flights of fancy.  Below you'll find instructions on how to
access a little flight simulator that was inexplicably hidden by
precipitation-maddened programmers deep inside Excel 97. 

In Excel 97, open a new blank work sheet.  Press F5 (go to function)And
type X97:L97 in the "Reference" box, then click OK. Now hit your tab key
once (you should end up in cell M97). 

Here's the tricky part:

press "Ctrl" and "Shift" while clicking once on the "chart wizard" icon
(the one at the top with the blue-yellow-red bar chart).  After a few
moments you should be flying.  Steer with the mouse, accel and decel with
the left and right mouse buttons respectively, and look for the monolith
with the programmer credits.  You can exit the screen by pressing
Ctrl+Shift+Esc. 



IJMC August 1998 Archives