Greetings. My name is David Gainer, and I am the Group Program Manager for Microsoft Excel. Starting today, I am joining several other members of the Microsoft Office team in sharing information about the upcoming release of Microsoft Office. Specifically, I am going to be writing about what’s new in Excel 12 (that’s a working title, not an official name). The Excel team is very excited about the product we are building, and I am looking forward to being able to talk about all the great work the...

We know you're pressed for time, and you want what you read to be worth the effort. Our question to you is this: What kind of blog post about Excel works best for you? Do great tips help you work smarter? Maybe code examples unlock your creative side? Or do guest posts from Excel MVPs hit home? Take this poll, and be heard. 

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Last post I covered improvements we made to a long-time fixture of the Excel UI - the formula bar. Today I’d like to introduce a feature that is brand new for Excel 12. The feature is called Formula AutoComplete, and it is designed to make users more efficient. Specifically, when we designed Formula AutoComplete, we had three goals: Help users build formulas faster Help users build formulas without needing to rely on external help Accomplish goals 1 and 2 in a way that is not intrusive or annoying...

Thanks to Sam Radakovitz, a Program Manager on the Excel team, for putting together this series on Sparklines. For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics” , as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence . Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing: In the above example, the sales number alone gives you a single...

Thanks to Danny Khen for putting together this post. What’s new? Excel has been a platform for developing business solutions for a long time now. Developers write code to customize and extend Excel in many ways – automating Excel operations, user interface customizations, data entry forms and extending Excel formulas with user defined functions, to name some key ones. Many developers create very complex applications, which have demanding requirements and push Excel to its limits, so developers are...

Two weeks ago, we posted about an issue involving the calculation of numbers around 65,535 and 65,536. As of today, fixes for this issue in Excel 2007 and Excel Services 2007 are available for download from the following locations: Excel 2007: http://download.microsoft.com/download/6/1/3/61343075-aa12-4152-a761-fccc16d6cef4/office-kb943075-fullfile-x86-glb.exe 64-bit Excel Services 2007: http://download.microsoft.com/download/c/d/c/cdcccd84-86cd-4199-b01c-1df2dac66534/office-kb943076-fullfile-x64...

For the next few posts, I’d like to spend some time explaining the work we’ve done in Excel 12 to improve the experience of working with tabular data in Excel. One thing that we see pretty much every Excel user doing with some frequency is working with tables. Tables can mean different things to different people so let me briefly define what we think of when we use the word table. A table is a simple structure where each row corresponds to a single “thing” (e.g. a specific transaction, an individual...

"How do I open my workbooks in separate windows?" This has been a common inquiry from many of our customers who want to look at their workbooks side by side, or spread them across more than one monitor. Good news: starting with Excel 2013, each of your workbooks opens in its own window, similar to Word and PowerPoint today. That means that each workbook has its own ribbon and top-level window frame that you can move and resize independent from your other open workbooks. This functionality can improve multitasking, visibility, and analysis across workbooks. Read on to find out how to put this functionality to work for you. .

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The team that builds the drawing tools in Office (sometimes referred to as OfficeArt) is interested in understanding all the different ways people are using the OfficeArt drawing tools, images, and audio/video with Excel. While a lot of the usage is well-understood (on charts as callouts, as controls on the grid, as backgrouds in an application, as navigational items, etc.), we run into people doing all sorts of interesting things, so we thought it would be interesting to hear from blog readers on...

If your workbook contains a ton of worksheets, it can be a hassle to navigate to just the right sheet. For one thing, you often can't see all the sheet names at the bottom of the workbook. Sure, you can move around by using the four navigation buttons to the left of the worksheet tabs, or by pressing Ctrl + Page Up or Ctrl + Page Down, but there are faster ways to jump from sheet to sheet.

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