Today we have a guest post from Sander Viegers, a user experience designer who worked on many aspects of Excel 2007. Hi, my name is Sander Viegers. I am user experience designer in the Office Design Group. I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Excel team on Excel 2007. In this blog entry I would like to provide some insight into how I contributed as a user experience designer. Since charting seems to be a highly popular topic on this blog, I’ll focus on the creation of the new charting experience...

In previous posts, I have talked about new features we have added around chart styles and table styles . These features, as you may or may not recall, are designed to make it easy to apply good-looking formatting and to create consistent-looking documents. We are in the process of finalizing the content for these styles, so we are looking for some help from readers of this blog. Below is a link to a survey on the consistency of a number of table and chart styles. The survey takes 10-15 minutes to...

In the post last week on Page Layout view , some of you may have noticed the words “Click to add header” in a few of the screenshots, which was a hint that there have been some changes in headers and footers in Excel 2007. I am going to review those changes, as well as a few other minor printing tweaks, in this post. When we added Page Layout view to Excel, we wanted to make it easier for users to see their work within the context of a printed page, thereby simplifying the process of getting work...

 

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.

 

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Conditional formatting is a popular feature and is a great way to easily identify cells with a range that meet some criteria. However, users often want to create conditional formatting rules that go beyond comparing a cell’s value to a single value or a single cell reference - row or column comparisons are commonly requested operations. In this blog post, we will learn how to use relative references in conditional formatting rules to make such tasks easier.

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This blog post is brought to you by Dan Battagin a Lead Program Manager on the Excel team. OK, so I'm going to talk a bit about a relatively unknown feature in Excel: XML data import. It was introduced in Excel 2003, but we've done a pretty good job hiding it since Excel 2007 by putting it on the Developer tab of the Ribbon. I'm going to make the topic even a bit more geeky by using it in conjunction with VBA. In exchange, I'm going to produce, at the end, a nice little solution that you can use...

Today’s author is Daniel Wiesenfeld, an Excel and Access Power User who is sharing his Extreme Lookup Collection with us so we can use the Excel User Defined Functions (UDFs) he created to enhance the lookup functionality. His web site danalytics.biz is currently under construction and should be available soon. In the Visual Basic Editor, insert a Module and paste the following code: ' XVLOOKUP (& XHLOOKUP) ' Works just like a vlookup (and hlookup) except that the user refers to a lookup colum...

I wanted to let everyone know a new beta of Office 2007 is now available for download and testing. (Note – you may see other sites referring to this as “B2TR” or using other similar terms. For all intents and purposes, you can think of this as the latest public beta of Office 2007, and the last public beta before we ship the product later this year). Here is a link to the page where you can download the beta. And here is a link to everything else available related to this beta (for example, the Save...

Before I carry on digging into the details of the new and improved features in Excel 12, I wanted to make sure everyone had a good sense for the work we’ve done in this version. When we were planning Excel 12, we spent a significant amount of time talking to a wide variety of customers. One theme that emerged clearly was that customers wanted to see continued innovation and improvement in the core aspects of spreadsheeting – working with data, formatting & printing, writing formulas, charting...

Last week, in response to my post on charting, Harlan pointed at a few Economist charts as examples of professional charts. Today, I spent a few minutes with Excel 2007 trying to create a similar chart. I thought I would share the results. The chart in question is located here . It is a line chart with a title and some series labels. Here is a screen shot. Source: The Economist web site To start with in Excel, I typed in the data (source: The Economist web site) and inserted a line chart … (Click...