When we started Excel 2007, we made a decision that as part of increasing the grid size, we were going to address a lot of important other “limits” in the product. The entire list can be seen here, in the second post I ever made to this blog . (Note, this is probably a good place to note that we had to back out the change to “The number of characters that can be stored and displayed in a cell formatted as Text” recently – we found a problem with the implementation that couldn’t be fixed at this late...

To this point in the blog, I've covered most of the new features that we've added to Excel 2007, but I wanted to quickly mention a couple of tools that folks use in Excel and where they can be found in Excel 2007 – specifically, the Solver and the Analysis ToolPak (ATP) Add-Ins. Enabling Excel Add-Ins First, a quick detour, since I haven't covered this in great depth previously : enabling these add-ins is done through the Office Button | Excel Options | Add-Ins, which is where all Add-In management...

Currently, the Excel development team is spending a lot of time tuning Excel 2007’s calculation performance to make it as fast as possible. Given the near-infinite variety of things we see people build in Excel, we are always looking for good examples of workbooks that are calculation-intensive to help us compare Excel 2007’s calculation performance with previous versions’ performance on real-world files that matter to customers. At some point last week it dawned on me that some of the Excel 12 blog...

A few months back I wrote several posts about the improvements that we made to PivotTables in Excel 2007. I even showed how summarizing data in different ways is now just a right click away on the “Summarize Data By...” menu. What I didn’t show was that in addition to these standard ways of summarizing data (sum, count, max, min, average, etc.), Excel already supports some more complex summary views for items contained in a PivotTable. For instance, by selecting “More Options,” you can choose to...

Thanks to Diego Oppenheimer for putting together this post. When thinking of Excel as an OLAP analytical tool the first thing that usually comes to mind is the ability to quickly and easily analyze data from an OLAP data source. With the introduction of PivotTable What-If Analysis in Excel 2010 you can now easily modify this data as well. Put simply, PivotTable What-If Analysis is the ability to modify values in PivotTable cells, recalculate the PivotTable with those values and, if the results are...

If you add all your bibliography sources when you're writing a paper in Microsoft Word, can you export them and move them to another computer?

This question came up recently, and here's how it works...

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Last week, we took a look at printing envelopes. But often people want to print labels--and then put the labels on envelopes, shipping boxes, CDs, file folders, jars of apricot jam, or whatever can be labeled.

How you make your labels depends on what kind of label you want to make...

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You have a killer PowerPoint presentation; the timing is perfect, the bullets are minimal, the effects just so. And now you want to take it to the next level by capturing and synchronizing audio and video narration,  add more rich, impactful media content, and get it ready for viewing in any browser. Maybe you're imagining it as a perfect way to beef up any e-learning experience or enhance normally stiff corporate communications.

So, who gonna call? (Ghostbusters? Uh, no, middle-ager). Why Producer for PowerPoint, of course.

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We at Microsoft share an authentic passion for pushing the boundaries of what technology can do for productivity. We love creating new products and services that solve problems for our customers and let people and businesses dream bigger. That’s why we’re incredibly excited about Microsoft® Office 365. Office 365 brings together online versions of our most trusted communications and collaboration products—Microsoft Exchange®, Microsoft SharePoint®, and Microsoft Lync®—with...

Last week we announced Microsoft Office 365, our next generation cloud productivity service. The bulk of the excitement has been about what the service means for our customers big and small, but it's been fun seeing the buzz created by the new name (my favorite being the suggestions about what to do on February 29 th !). What's in a name? As you've likely read, Office 365 brings together Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online as well as Microsoft Office desktop software and Web apps. There...