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...

Over the next few days, I am on a ridiculously over-scheduled training course, so I will not be producing any new content until sometime mid next week (and probably not answering comments or emails until then too). In the meantime, I wanted to ask you what you would like to see covered in this blog over the next few months. Way back when I started this last September , I wrote “I plan to write this blog from now until around the general availability of Office 12, and I am hoping to talk in some depth...

In addition to improving the formula editing UI in Excel 12, the team has spent some time adding to Excel’s function library. Over the years, customers have found new ways to combine and leverage the functions in Excel to build all sorts of things, but there remain many areas where our customers would like to see need new capability. This release, we have targeted three areas in which to improve our function library – the Analysis ToolPak, SQL Server Analysis Services, and the most common requests...

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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Thanks to Dan Battagin for writing this blog post. OK, so I'm sure everyone knows about the Freeze Panes feature in Excel - it's been around forever, and it's pretty useful in certain circumstances where you want to keep a row (or more) of data at the top of the sheet, or column on the side of the sheet - especially for filtering. Of course, we've made it a little less necessary in the 2007 and 2010 releases, since table headers (2007) and now table filters (2010) automatically camp out in the row...

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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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...

The other night at home, I was doing some work at home, I ran across a situation where I wished that our “Data Validation” functionality and “Pick From List” were integrated – specifically, it would have been really nice if, after I set up Data Validation on a range, Excel recognized when I was typing an entry from the list of valid possible entries. Here’s an example. Say I was categorizing some expenses in this Table, and I have set up Data Validation on the last column to make sure I do not mis...

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...

I thought this would be interesting to share to see how other Excel folks might have solved this problem. I got a question recently from a customer asking how to automatically take a set of values in one column, say: 1000 5000 600 and repeat each value, say, 4 times in the next column, so that it looks something like this: 1000 1000 1000 1000 5000 5000 5000 5000 ... and so on. My response: the only way to truly do this automatically is to write a custom macro. However, if you can suffer through a...