Yesterday we were alerted to an issue in Excel 2007 (and Excel Services 2007) involving calculation of numbers around 65,535. The Excel team would like to provide a description of the issue and explain what we're doing about it. Background Yesterday evening we were alerted to an issue in Excel 2007 (and Excel Services 2007) involving calculation of numbers around 65,535. The first example that we heard about was =77.1*850, but it became clear from our testing as well as additional reports that this...

Following MacWorld earlier this week, there has been some inaccurate information circulating online regarding VBA support in Office for Windows. While it’s true that VBA isn't supported in the latest version of Office for the Mac and the VBA licensing program did close to new customers last year, we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows. We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers; accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA...

Before we begin our whirlwind tour of all things Excel, I thought I’d give you a quick glance at the things we’ve done. The “table of contents” if you will. That way you’ll have an idea of what to expect in the coming weeks, and I hope it gives you a sense of the amount of work we’ve put into this release. Many of our investments in this release are a continuation of the goals and vision that started in the 2007 release. A few examples: Excel 2007 debuted brand new conditional formatting features...

About 18 months ago, I wrote a post on keyboard shortcuts: http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2006/02/23/538311.aspx . It was a well-read post that generated a lot of comments and a lot of follow-up email. To this day, I get emails about this post, a number of which have been people asking for an XLS version of this PDF ( http://isamrad.com/dgainer/1_02-23-2006.pdf ), presumably so folks can layer their own stuff on top. Accordingly, I thought it was time for a another post on the topic. Here is...

Today Eric Patterson returns with a few more guest posts on Compatibility. Thus far the discussion about compatibility has been focused on how new features in Excel 2007 are handled when saving files to previous versions or when working in Compatibility Mode. The flip side of the discussion is the list of features that are being deprecated for Excel 2007. That will be the topic for today’s post. Why Remove Anything? Before jumping to the list of which features are being deprecated or removed, let...

Defined names are a very useful tool for authoring formulas. Defined names allow users to name cell ranges, formulas, and values and refer to those names in their formulas. Used in formulas, defined names make formulas easier to read and more robust. Additionally, when writing formulas, names are less likely to get mis-typed than cell references, and they are easier to remember than cell references (“Tax_Rate” as opposed to “G36”). In this article, I would like to discuss some of the work we’ve done...

Today’s author: Scott Ruble, the program manager who leads the charting and visualization efforts in Excel. Scott is looking for some feedback on potential changes to data bar behaviour. Excel 2007 has a conditional formatting feature that graphically displays bars in a cell to represent the value of the cell. This feature is called Data Bars. You can see an example of this by using the following steps: In Excel 2007, enter 1, 2, 3 in cells A1, A2, and A3 respectively. Select cells A1:A3. From the...

Today's author, Robin Wakefield, a Program Manager on the Excel team, discusses charts. As a new program manager in Excel one of my first tasks was to understand what problems users encounter when building professional charts in Excel. I defined professional as following the principles of Edward Tufte by reducing the amount of non-data ink on a chart. On an earlier post , there were a lot of comments about this particular aspect and I agree we could do better in helping users accomplish this goal...

As part of the Excel team’s work to increase the number of rows and columns in Excel 12, we also increased a number of the other “limits” in the product. This work falls into a two categories. First, we increased a number of limits to support our “big grid” work. These are limits that we increased to make sure that all of Excel’s features could scale to handle more rows and columns. A lot of folks have already asked about these sorts of limits in comments to my first post, in emails, and in comments...

One of our goals with tables was to create a set of features that reduce the overall maintenance required to keep a spreadsheet functioning well over time. This involves making spreadsheets less prone to error, as well as making them more understandable days, months, and years after the spreadsheet was created. Rethinking the interaction between tables and formulas proved to be an important part of meeting that goal. As many readers have presaged, Excel 12 provides some new ways to reference tables...