BioIT Alliance I haven’t spent a lot of time on the new Excel file formats, since Brian Jones is writing a blog on that subject , but I saw a story today on Brian's blog that was interesting, so I thought I would share it with you. Specifically, he posted a story about an industry group getting ready to take advantage of the Open XML formats for their business solutions. The newly announced BioIT alliance was formed to help connect the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, hardware, and software industries...

A while ago, I wrote a post about 214 keyboard shortcuts . In the last few months, we have added 4 more for one reason or another, so I wanted to pass them on. (I have not updated the matrix I included as part of that post, because I accidently misplaced the file that I used to make it in the first place. At some point I will.) In no particular order, here they are: Reapply Sort and Filter (to a Table or an AutoFiltered range) - CTRL+ALT+L Refresh (Query Table, PivotTable, etc.) = ALT+F5 Refresh...

 Okay, you’ve got data arranged in spreadsheet rows and columns, with column headers. So why try tables?

Well, tables make it easy to format data, sort, filter, add totals, and use formulas. With tables, you don’t need to fuss to get formatting just right. Excel automatically adds formatting that makes tables stand out from any other data on your spreadsheet. And if you don’t like the formatting you see at first, Excel has many table formats to select from.

Tables automatically come with drop-down arrows at the top of each column that you can use to sort and filter.

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Today's blog post on repairing numbers that are formatted as text is brought to you by Gary Willoughby, who writes Help content for Microsoft Excel.

A few months ago, my new manager e-mailed us (that is, her team of Excel writers). She had a spreadsheet with some columns of numbers that she wanted to total, and the answer was resolving to 0. When you have lots of values in a column and their total is 0, you have a problem: Those numbers may not be numbers at all! (cue the scary music).

Keep reading to learn how to solve this common problem.

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I mentioned in my previous post that the three-condition limit on sorting (Data|Sort) has been removed in Excel 12. As someone correctly pointed out in a comment many posts ago, this means the current sort dialog has changed in Excel 12. Here’s what the new dialog will look like (as always, all the details aren’t finalized, but the key features are clear) if you were in the middle of trying to sort a table by 5 columns: (Click to enlarge) The dialog is similar in behaviour to the Conditional Formatting...

Being able to remove duplicate rows of information from a table of data is a request we hear fairly often from our customers (and one of the top questions in the comments in this blog). Some users know that this capability exists in Excel today; unfortunately it is buried under advanced filter settings and it’s not terribly easy to use. So we set out in Excel 12 to build a better interface specifically for this task so that any user could easily remove unnecessary data from their spreadsheet. Remove...

Keyboard shortcuts....You use them every day to make your work flow smoothly, or - in some cases - to make your work flow, period. In all honesty, I use some of them so often that I have no idea where to find those functions on the ribbon! (Copy? Paste? Undo? I haven't done those with a mouse in YEARS!) And I know I'm not alone. In the content that I manage, it is THE most popular subject, and generates the most feedback, with Excel users leading the charge.

So, in response to an overwhelming number of requests from you, Excel users, I've created some Quick Reference Cards - sheets, really - that you can download and save, or just print and keep near your workstation. Keep reading to learn how to access this new resource.

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Today's author: John Campbell, a program manager who works on the Excel Services teams. Replacing OWC Reporting with Excel Services As a Program Manager on the Excel Services team, I often field emails from people who have a thin reporting solution that is based on Office Web Components (OWC). They would like to migrate that solution to Excel Services, but aren't sure how or what the pitfalls are. In this entry I will talk about what OWC functionality Excel Services can be used to replace, some common...

Thanks to Jessica Liu for putting together the next few posts on function improvements. In Excel 2010, we made many improvements to Excel's function library. Excel 2010 will feature an accurate and consistent function library while remaining compatible with previous versions of Excel. In this first blog post, I will be giving an overview of the work we did in this area as well as talk about the function accuracy improvements. Subsequent posts will go into the details of the consistency improvements...

In the past two posts I talked about all of the improvements we have made to the function library in terms of accuracy and consistency. In this post I will describe the UI changes we have made to help users take advantage of these improvements in Excel 2010. In addition I will also talk about the backward compatibility experience for the new function library. Function Improvements UI Changes As a result of the changes we’ve made to improve the consistency of Excel’s function library, we have introduced...