With the Office 2013 release, the Office DataViz team is proud to deliver a rich set of charting capabilities across Excel, Word, PowerPoint, and Project. In fact, because there are so many features, this article will only be an overview. Subsequent articles will go into the specific use cases and steps for each of them.

I’ve been working on Excel charting since the Office 2007 release, when we replaced the charting engine, changed the rendering layer, and enabled charts to run on the server. This was a pretty ambitious release, which set a whole new direction for data visualizations in Office. Since then, I’ve written several blog articles on Excel charting, and many of the reader comments have centered around when we were going to provide feature x, y, or z. I always appreciated these comments because it showed that there was a very passionate community of users who really cared about the charting capabilities in Office.

This post is brought to you by Diego Oppenheimer a Program Manager on the Excel team.

I am very happy to be writing this blog post today. Not just because I will be showing you another way Excel can make your data analysis easier but also because I will be introducing the new Data Model and Relationships features that will hopefully change the way you use Excel for data analysis forever.

Our guest blogger and Excel MVP award winner, Debra Dagleish, makes it easy to create an Excel dropdown list that lets you select multiple names in one cell. The magic to her method is adding a few lines of VBA code--a trick just about anyone can learn, even if you don't know programming.

Northwind Trading Company is a growing online wholesale food business. Orders from retail merchants are coming in from across the country and are being stored in an Access database. Now the marketing team needs a better way to view the mounds of data. Luckily, the same features that Excel provides for viewing and organizing information in a spreadsheet, can be used to view and organize information in an Access database. But first you need to create the connection.

This post is brought to you by Chad Rothschiller a Program Manager on the Excel team.

Today I’m proud to be writing about a new feature in Excel 2013 called Flash Fill that makes all of those tasks very simple for even the most novice user. Several years ago, I wrote a blog post demonstrating how to do string manipulations like the above examples. The problem is that the solutions relied heavily on using formulas, which can feel quite complex and intimidating for people not as familiar with Excel. Now, with Flash Fill, you can do it all without formulas. In fact, it’s easier than that. Now you can do it all by providing a few examples.

This blog post is brought to you by Melissa MacBeth, Lead Program Manager on the Excel Web App team.

As Dan mentioned in his blog post, there’s data all over the web, and with the Excel Button we are giving you a way to get deeper insights with nothing more than the click of a familiar looking button. In this post, I’ll go a little deeper into the HOWS and WHYS of this new awesome feature.

What is it? The Excel Button, also known as the Excel Interactive View, is like the Facebook Like Button, but for data on the web. When you find an Excel Button, click it and you’ll see the simple HTML table that you were just looking at get transformed into an immersive and interactive Excel experience complete with filters, conditional formatting, sorting, and charts. And of course, you can go from there directly into Excel Web App or download it to your desktop to open it in Excel.

This post is brought to you by Steve Tullis Group Program Manager of the Office Business Intelligence team.

This is the third introductory post from the Excel family – Office BI. If you have not read Jane’s post about the Excel client, or Dan’s post about the browser-based versions of Excel, I encourage you to do so, as they are great overviews and provide foundational information about how we decided in what to invest, and how those investments are manifest in the Excel products. In this post, I will share the Business Intelligence specific story which is designed to provide an end-to-end experience that both empowers end users to have a great conversations with their data, and enables IT to manage the risk inherent with empowered end users.

This blog post is brought to you by Dan Battagin, Group Program Manager for the Excel Web App team.

Greetings - I hope everyone's been enjoying the content on the blog over the last few releases, and that everyone's excited to see what's coming in the next version of Office, Excel, and the Excel Web App. Jane mentioned in her last post how we went about deciding what to invest in, and today I’ll share with you some of the broad investment areas for the browser-based versions of Excel. Of course, all I expect that to do is whet your appetite – so in the coming months the team and I will take you through the details of some of the key changes/additions we've made.

As always - we'd love to get your feedback here or directly through the public beta that's available on SkyDrive or Office365. So without further ado, let's see what's on the topic list!

This blog post is brought to you by Jane Liles Group Program Manager for the Excel team. With this post she kicks off a brand new blog series introducing all the features we have added across Excel for the release of Office 2013.

Greetings from the Excel team hallway…

By now you’ve hopefully tuned into our Office Next blog, which provides all-up view of our latest release for Office, and seen some articles on the web. Today I have the privilege of sharing a high-level view of Excel 2013, a release that arrives on the heels of Excel’s 25^th anniversary. The team has been working hard to deliver the next version, and we’re excited to be able to share Excel 2013 Preview with you and hear your feedback.

Excel is a powerful spreadsheet and data analysis application, with hundreds of capabilities that can help you organize and make sense of the data and numbers in your life. We’ve made several investments in Excel 2013 to empower our users by bringing these and more capabilities to you in ways that are easy, intuitive, and enjoyable. But before I tell you about where we focused our efforts, I’d like to share a little about how we got there.

There have been ample articles about troubleshooting unintentional circular references in Excel workbooks. This post focuses on the opposite: choosing to deliberately work with circular references. Circular references aren't a bad thing in itself: you can use them to achieve complex calculations that are otherwise impossible to do, but first you must set them up properly.