Today’s author: Sam Radakovitz, a program manager on the Excel team that enjoys creating VBA applications in Excel. Back in early 2005, Excel 2007 was under development, the Backstreet Boys released a new album, and I took a weekend out to create a date picker add-in for Excel. The add-in was fun to write, not super duper fancy code, but it got the job done and helped me learn about the various Excel events and Excel’s add-in model. I pushed it up on the web, got some feedback and made...

Some of the most frequently asked questions that we receive are about Excel's IF function. In this previously published Q&A, a writer on the Excel team answers some of the most common questions. 

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In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the new Conditional Formatting features in Excel 2010 such as: Cross-Sheet References Robust Error Handling Performance Enhancements Cross-Sheet References In Excel 2010, you can create conditional formatting with references to a different sheet on the workbook. This means that you no longer need to copy or link your data to the same sheet when using conditional formatting. For Example, let us look at the monthly sales data for a bookstore chain....

Since I have been writing this blog, I have periodically been asked “what’s up with the Office Web Components”. Today, I wanted to post the official “roadmap” from the Office Web Components team. Here you go: As some of you have recently noticed, the Office Web Components are no longer installed when installing Microsoft Office 2007. The Office Web Components (OWC) are a set of ActiveX® controls that provide four principal components: Spreadsheet, Chart, PivotTable®, and Data Source Control (DSC...

To this point in the blog, I haven't talked too much about the file formats that Excel 2007 uses, since Brian Jones has been covering the new Office Open XML format pretty well in his blog. Today I thought I'd give an overview of the three main formats that we have in Excel 2007. File Format Number 1 - Office Open XML (XLSX, XLSM, XLTX, XLTM, and XLAM files) The Office Open XML format is a full fidelity (all features of the product are supported) file format for Excel 2007, and it is the default...

Today’s author, Chad Rothschiller, a Program Manager on the Excel team, is back with a follow up from his previous post on VBA and Excel performance . I want to start off this post by thanking everyone who sent in their examples in response to my January request. It is incredibly helpful to be able to look at what you all are doing with Excel! Not only did I see a huge variety in how Excel is being used, you also pointed out various tips and tricks for writing fast VBA code in Excel. In this...

Today’s author is Ron de Bruin , an Excel MVP. You can find more useful tips and links to Excel add-ins at his website: http://www.rondebruin.nl/ You see a lot of old SaveAs code that does not specify the FileFormat parameter. In Excel versions before Excel 2007, code without this parameter will not cause too many problems because Excel will use the current FileFormat of the existing file -- and the default FileFormat for new files is a normal workbook. But because there are so many new file...

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...

Today’s post is brought to you by Frederique Klitgaard. Frederique is a writer on Office.com It’s easy to understand why the IF function appears in the top 10 list of popular Excel functions. It’s a versatile function that can be used for all sorts of tasks. For example, this function can save you a lot of time when you need to grade a stack of papers. It quickly turns a long list of test scores into grades without having to do any of the math. It can also instantly determine who...

We are pleased to announce that a new version of the Excel Viewer is now available for download . To quote the download site: " With Excel Viewer, you can open, view, and print Excel workbooks, even if you don't have Excel installed. You can also copy data from Excel Viewer to another program. However, you cannot edit data, save a workbook, or create a new workbook. This download is a replacement for Excel Viewer 97 and all previous Excel Viewer versions. "