Thanks to Ben Rampson for putting together this post. In today’s article I will outline three features in Office 2010 that improve table interaction in Excel. These feature additions build on the work started Excel 2007, addressing areas with significant customer feedback and further improving the feature area. The first table improvement feature, AutoFilters in sheet headers, builds on work completed in the previous version of Excel. In Office 2007, when the table header of a selected table is scrolled...

Today’s blog post is brought to you by Dan Parish a Program Manager on the Excel Web App team. New! See the end of this post for updates on how to embed. One of the feature requests we frequently get for Excel Web App is “it would be great if there was a way to embed my workbook in my blog”. Well, starting today, if you have an Excel workbook (xlsx or xlsb only) or a PowerPoint presentation on SkyDrive, you can embed them! In fact, the following embedded PowerPoint presentation...

Thanks to Chad Rothschiller for putting together these posts on performance. In this release of Excel we spent dedicated research and development resources on improving performance. In addition to the usual optimizations and tuning efforts we make post “code complete”, we spent time during the development milestones researching, designing, and implementing performance features beyond algorithmic tuning. For this release, these are the areas where we focused our performance improvement efforts: Customer...

One of the key benefits of tables is how other features in Excel 12 behave more predictably and more like you would expect when a table is present. This is made possible by the fact that Excel knows exactly where the table starts and ends, where the header row is, which cells make up the data and which columns they belong to, where the total row is, etc. So how exactly does this benefit the user? Here are some of the different ways in Excel’s awareness of the structure of your data changes the user...

A few days ago, I outlined some changes that had been made to Tools|Options. Today, I wanted to run through how the options were organized for those of you that are curious, and point out one other feature I forgot to mention Monday. Since we already looked at the “Personalize” tab, let’s start with the Formulas tab. (Click to enlarge) As you can see, the most commonly changed options are available here. (Harlan, I think you made a comment about many of the options on the “Personalize” tab being...

Today Eric Patterson continues his discussion on Compatibility. Last week I described the features that we have deprecated for Excel 2007 . Today I want to expand on that list to include the features related to Charting in Office 2007. There has been a lot of work in Office 2007 to move charting to use a shared Office drawing layer. David has devoted a number of past blog posts on charting that describe all of this work. Reasons for change? As with other features in Excel, we never deprecate Chart...

The second new visualization that we have added to Excel 12 is something we are calling “colour scales” (again, that may change later when we finish official feature naming). It shares a lot with data bars as described in a previous post – it is a comparison between a selected range of cells, it uses visual effects to communicate the results to users, and it is just as configurable as a data bar with respect to setting colour and thresholds. So how is a colour scale different from a data bar? A colour...

I’d like to take this opportunity to announce a new feature of the blog, which some of you might have noticed already. Our Content Publishing team has begun collecting “Power Tips” from members of the Excel community, including the product team, Excel MVPs, user group members, and other Excel enthusiasts. Power Tips are intermediate-level “How-to” tips that you can use to enhance your spreadsheets. We hope they’ll be valuable to those of you who feel pretty proficient with Excel, but who don’t consider...

Today's author: Mark Gillis, an Excel and SharePoint writer, who's been through six versions of Office, survived to tell the tale, and picked up a thing or two along the way. Excel doesn't have an easy way to append multiple text files into one worksheet through the user interface. From time to time I hear customers asking how to do this in an easy way. Do you have to use Access or VB code to solve this problem? No. There's a way to do it in Excel by using a simple SQL statement in the connection...

Today’s Author: Scott Ruble, a lead program manager on the Excel team who focuses on the area of data visualization. Scott is going to discuss how to create an intraday time series chart. Periodically, users need to create a chart where the data occurs within a single day such as by the minute or hour. This is actually fairly easy to do but unfortunately isn’t very obvious. A typical scenario is you own a restaurant that takes phone orders and you want to reduce the wait time for customers placing...