We have some great news for Excel fans around the world! Our friends over at Microsoft Business Intelligence have launched an exciting new challenge on Facebook to test your skills and knowledge of Excel. Join the So You Think You Know Excel Challenge to answer 15 questions about Excel and you could get your name up on the leaderboard. Challenge your friends and colleagues or just play for fun.

And you'll have the chance to enter the sweepstakes portion of this event, where we'll randomly select 2 sweepstakes entrants to receive a brand new Kinect for Xbox 360 prize pack, plus 10 additional sweepstakes entrants to receive a Microsoft branded swag pack.

Need to navigate that huge spreadsheet quickly? Freeze panes can help by allowing you to view your column and row headings continuously while you scroll your document. In this webinar, we'll demonstrate how to freeze panes in an Excel workbook, plus we'll give you 5 tips of this feature, just in case you've ever been stumped while trying to freeze panes.

What you will learn at Tuesday's webinar

• How to freeze & unfreeze rows and columns
• The difference between freezing panes, locking cells, and...

CTRL+PgUp, CTRL+F, SHIFT+TAB: keyboard shortcuts can help you streamline work in Excel and look like a magician in a spreadsheet.   We're currently planning the next round of keyboard shortcuts to add to Web Excel and would love to hear your input. Let us know about your favorite shortcuts in desktop Excel by filling out this survey.

On February 27, we announced an early look at a future addition to our self-service line-up with Microsoft Data Explorer Preview for Excel. Data Explorer enhances the self-service BI experience in Excel by simplifying data discovery and access to a broad range of public and enterprise data sources, enabling richer insights from data that has traditionally been difficult for users to get to. With Data Explorer, users can now quickly and easily import data from a variety of sources, including Web, Excel, Text, Database and Azure. 

Read on to learn how access to non-traditional sources such as Active Directory, Facebook and big data solutions like Hadoop are now within the reach of any user.

The world of data continues to become bigger and more complex, with no plans to slow down. From April 10-12 in Chicago, data professionals and business analysts will gather at the PASS Business Analytics Conference to keep pace with the latest trends around big data, predictive analytics, data visualization, Hadoop, and even the new version of Excel. If you're a fan of Excel and are curious about how it fits within the Microsoft Business Analytics platform or you want to master how to use tools like PowerPivot or PowerView in Excel 2013, you may want to pack your bags for Chicago.

With the announcement of easier collaboration on SkyDrive, sharing files with friends, family and colleagues just got a whole lot easier! Now you can share a link to your Excel files with anyone and they can edit the workbooks without needing to sign in with a Microsoft account, even at the same time! Read on to find out how to put this functionality to work for you.

With the enhancements to Excel Services as part of the new Office, we now support query table refresh. Workbooks with query tables now can be seamlessly refreshed on the go from any browser! No need to convert your query table to a pivot table or download a workbook to desktop Excel client to refresh your query table. In other words, broad sharing of workbooks throughout an organization just got easier.

Better business intelligence and insight can make the difference between a business surviving and thriving. Microsoft aims to make business intelligence (BI) more accessible to everyone across an organization, in part by providing BI capabilities in familiar tools such as Excel to empower more users to build and consume rich BI solutions as part of their everyday work. If you're interested in how Excel's BI capabilities could fit within your organization's broader BI solution, learn more about the Microsoft BI Solution Builder, an online configuration tool that helps you see how the capabilities in the products you currently own could contribute to a complete BI solution.

"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. .

Have you ever had two different types of data that you wanted to show in one chart? Learn how Excel 2013 makes it easier to create combo charts with a second axis.