All MVP's & regular contributors

[michael.beckinsale]

Hi All,

I have seen various posts on this newsgroup that it has now been
closed down. The number of postings over the past few days seem to
support this.

I have used, and contributed to this newsgroup, for several years now
and have found it to be the most useful source of information for all
things related to Excel & VBA on the internet. I will be very sad if
its demise is imminent.

My understanding is that this newsgroup is to be replaced by a
'forum'. Please would all the MVP's and regular contributors let us
know which forums they will be monitoring & responding to in the
future.

If any of the above is inaccurate l would be grateful for any clarity
on the subject

Thank you all for your help over the past years.

Regards

Michael beckinsale

 

[James Ravenswood]

Hi All,

I have seen various posts on this newsgroup that it has now been
closed down. The number of postings over the past few days seem to
support this.

I have used, and contributed to this newsgroup, for several years now
and have found it to be the most useful source of information for all
things related to Excel & VBA on the internet. I will be very sad if
its demise is imminent.

My understanding is that this newsgroup is to be replaced by a
'forum'. Please would all the MVP's and regular contributors let us
know which forums they will be monitoring & responding to in the
future.

If any of the above is inaccurate l would be grateful for any clarity
on the subject

Thank you all for your help over the past years.

Regards

Michael beckinsale

Hi Michael:

Standard Excel forums are here:

http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/default.aspx#tab=4

Another VBA forum is here:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/isvvba/threads

Excel for developers forum is here:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/exceldev/threads

Excel for IT people is here:

http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/excel/threads

As you see, Answers, TechNet, and MSDN each supply separate support.

gsnu201003

 

[Dave Peterson]

This may be completely wrong:

Newsgroups live on the NNTP network. Users from all over the world connect to
different newsservers. And each newsserver saves messages (length of time and
which groups will vary with each newsserver). Since the messages are spread out
over lots and lots of newsservers, no one server controls all the newsgroups.

But the MSNewservers are being phased out. I'm sure that they'll send out a
"please remove microsoft.public.xxx.yyy" message. But each newsserver will
decide to respect that request or ignore it.

If the one you connect to decide to remove the ms.public newsgroups, then you'll
have to find another newsserver that continues to carry them. Right now, I
don't think anyone knows what those individual newsservers will do.

I used to directly connect to the msnews server. Now I connect to 3 free
newsserver (but only use one).

news.aioe.org (some limits, like: 25 posts per day))
news.eternal-september.org (http://www.eternal-september.org to read about it)
news.albasani.net

I was using the aioe.org server for lurking in other newsgroups, but now I'm
using the eternal-september.org newsserver to read and post. All 3 seem ok to
me. (The bottom two require registration (free).)

The volume of questions has gone down (a lot!) and I think that the number of
spam messages is greater than the msservers. (MS did a nice job cleaning that
junk.)

=======
As for the MS web based stuff. I find that difficult to use.

But the community bridge by Jochen Kalmbach works pretty darn nice. It provides
a way to access these forums via your newsreader. (I didn't have to change that!)

Ron de Bruin has some notes here:
http://www.rondebruin.nl/nntpbridge.htm

Ron's notes include a link to the MS supported bridges -- in case something
changes and Jochen's Community Bridge is broken.

If you can use a newsreader (are you blocked at work???), you may not notice too
much of a difference!

These are the forums I connect to:
Answers.en-US.excelform
Answers.en-US.excelshare
Answers.en-US.excslcreate (note the typo in the spelling of excel!)
Msdn.en-US.exceldev
technet.en-us.excel
Answers.en-US.officeprog
Answers.en-US.excelchart
Msdn.en-US.testForumsVV
Answers.en-US.answerssandbox

The bottom two are used for testing to make sure you can post in the format you
like.

(Every once in a while, I search for us.excel to see if there are more English
language Excel forums.)

The .officeprog seems to be a catchall group for all of the individual programs
in the Office suite. It can be a problem to sift through to get to those
important excel questions <vbg>.

I don't think the volume of posts matches the newsgroups from a few weeks ago.
But I bet users are still searching for these forums.

 

[michael.beckinsale]

James / David,

Many thanks for the info which will take a bit of digesting!

I hope other regular posters & MVP's will contirbute to this post over
the next few days / weeks so that everybody knows where to look and
then hoprfully we can all continue to get the same level of excellent
support that this newsgroup has supplied in the past.

My thoughts are if isn't broke don't fix it, but you never know with
MS

Regards

Michael