It's often helpful to create charts that compare different types of data. For example, you might want to compare overall revenue with the number of units sold. To do that you need to know how to use different chart types in one chart and how to use a secondary vertical axis to plot values that are in a different value range. Read more to learn how. (Sample workbook included)

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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...

Today’s Author: Eric Patterson, a program manager on the Excel team. Eric is going to discuss applying pattern fills to chart data points and includes a sample add-in for this purpose. Overview In Excel 2007, the interface for applying Pattern fills to chart elements has been removed in favor of the interface for applying Picture and Texture fills. Charts formatted with pattern fills in previous versions of Excel will retain and display the pattern fills when opened in Excel 2007. Here is an example...

The title of this post sounds simple. Should be easy to do, right? But customers tell us that it's very confusing and not at all clear where to find the features to get the results they want. It all depends on what you want to merge or split. For example, you may want to create a large header cell by splitting the cells below it into a number of smaller cells.

I often create such headers but use a different method than you'd expect, because an individual cell simply cannot be split into smaller cells. Instead, I merge several cells into one larger cell above the cells for which it will be the header. The result is exactly the same.

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Are you confused by how Excel handles percentage formatting, or by percentages in general? It's okay, you're not alone.

In this post, find out more about how Excel displays percentages, and learn basic techniques for calculating percent decrease, percent increase, and percent change.

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Today’s author is Reinout Dorreboom from the Netherlands, a Technical Consultant at Getronics, where he has worked with Office applications for many years, and where his Microsoft Certified Training skills enabled him to help other people get up to speed with Excel. In Excel 2007 (and earlier), it’s possible to create a drop-down list. By using the INDIRECT function, you can then create additional drop-down lists that are conditional to the first drop-down list. In this example we’ll...

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...

Conditional formatting is a popular feature and is a great way to easily identify cells with a range that meet some criteria. However, users often want to create conditional formatting rules that go beyond comparing a cell’s value to a single value or a single cell reference - row or column comparisons are commonly requested operations. In this blog post, we will learn how to use relative references in conditional formatting rules to make such tasks easier.

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Thanks to Sam Radakovitz, a Program Manager on the Excel team, for putting together this series on Sparklines. For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics” , as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence . Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing: In the above example, the sales number alone gives you a single...

Going, going, gone! Yes, it’s true that the Chart Wizard was removed from the product when we shipped Excel 2007, and we didn’t bring it back in Excel 2010.

For those of you upgrading from Excel 97-2003, this may come as a big shock. The Chart Wizard provided a useful four-step process that you could simply follow to create a chart with a finishing touch. Unfortunately, it didn’t make sense to update the Chart Wizard to incorporate the many changes that were made when the chart engine was rebuilt for Excel 2007. Instead, the ribbon became the new place to go for all your charting needs.

Keep reading to learn how easy it is to create and work with charts in Excel 2010.

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