Today I decided to take a quick break from Excel Services to talk about a few small but useful changes that have been made to the status bar and show off a few charts First, the status bar Zoom control - we have added a slider that allows the user to adjust the “zoom” of the document without needing to pop up any windows. When you slide the control, the document resizes as you slide, so you can adjust to just the “zoom” you want before you let go of the slider. You can also click on the + and – buttons...

Yesterday I wrote about some work I was doing with Tables recently. Today I want to do the same for conditional formatting – specifically, using colour scales. (For a refresher, or for those that are new to this blog, you can read up on changes to conditional formatting in this series of blog posts , and you can read specifically about colour scales here ). In this case, I was looking at a table that contained the results of a set of tests. The table looked like this (again, I made up the data for...

A few posts ago when I described the work we did in the area of “great looking documents” , I mentioned charting. I am going to spend the next week or two covering charting in detail. For this first two posts, I want to cover how we have used the ribbon to make it possible, with no more than 3-4 clicks, to create a wide variety of professional-looking charts. When talking to customers about charting in Excel, one of the big pieces of feedback we hear is how hard it is to make a chart that looks ready...

I’d like to shift gears a bit and talk about the work we’ve done to improve the experience around building and editing formulas. For most customers, this is a core activity in their daily use of the product. In planning for this version of Excel, we took a hard look at the features in this area, and we have made what we think are some significant improvements. Over the next week, I am going to cover the work we have done in this area. To start, let's take a look at some changes to the formula bar...

Conditional Formatting is a feature that allows users to apply formatting to cell(s) automatically depending on the value of the cell or the value of a formula. This is a handy feature, making it easy to highlight certain values (“all test scores below 50% turn red”), or make particular cells easy to identify (“all the tasks assigned to Dave turn green”). It is also a powerful feature, given that conditions can be based on any Excel formula. Users that know about the feature love it, and many book...

Today’s author: Chad Rothschiller, a program manager on the Excel team. Chad is going to discuss using formulas to 'clean up' data in Excel. Overview Excel is a great tool to use when you need to take data in one format, manipulate it into another format, and push the results along to another process, e.g. a database. In this context, Excel is a great landing pad or middle man, serving as a data transformation tool to move data from one system to another. This example considers a sample data set...

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...

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...

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...