A few months ago, I described the new features we have added to Excel 2007 in the area of conditional formatting. One of the new formats we added is called a “data bar” … check out this earlier post for a refresher , but the basic idea is that Excel draws a bar in each cell representing the value of that cell relative to the other cells in the selected range. Here is a shot from that post. (Click to enlarge) The Excel 2007 UI allows you to choose whatever colour you want for your data bars, but,...

Today's author, Eric Patterson, a Program Manager on the Excel team, describes how to use Excel Tables as a source for a mail merge – a great productivity tool for sending out holiday greeting cards! :) Eric wrote this before the holidays but unfortunately I was out of the office and didn’t get to post this until now. Very useful nonetheless. At this time of the year I find myself preparing to send out a large number of greeting cards to friends and family. I have most of my addresses...

Today Eric Patterson returns with a few more guest posts on Compatibility. Thus far the discussion about compatibility has been focused on how new features in Excel 2007 are handled when saving files to previous versions or when working in Compatibility Mode. The flip side of the discussion is the list of features that are being deprecated for Excel 2007. That will be the topic for today’s post. Why Remove Anything? Before jumping to the list of which features are being deprecated or removed, let...

Today's author, Robin Wakefield, a Program Manager on the Excel team, discusses charts. As a new program manager in Excel one of my first tasks was to understand what problems users encounter when building professional charts in Excel. I defined professional as following the principles of Edward Tufte by reducing the amount of non-data ink on a chart. On an earlier post , there were a lot of comments about this particular aspect and I agree we could do better in helping users accomplish this goal...

Today’s author is Greg Truby, an Excel MVP, who addresses some common issues you may encounter when you use the VLOOKUP function. This article assumes a basic familiarity with the VLOOKUP() function, one of the easiest ways to lookup up a key value in one worksheet or block of data and return a related piece of information from a second worksheet or block of data. When using VLOOKUP() we frequently find ourselves facing three common problems: · We need to look up based on more than one...

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...

Today's author, Charlie Ellis, continues discussing the spreadsheet he built to solve Sudoku puzzles. In my previous post , I walked through a number of formulas for setting up the valid values and solution board. In this post we'll cover using iteration and other formula tricks to help solve the puzzle. Using valid values to drive solutions Looking at cells P22:R24 below, we can clearly see that the only solution here is 7: Let's reflect this in the solution board. We're going to modify the "else...

Today's author: Mark Gillis is an Excel writer. He was born October 3, 1952. Does his birthday fall on the same weekday as your birthday? Do you have nagging, unanswered questions floating around in the back of your mind like: "What day of the week does the date, January 23, 4589 fall on?", "What's the date of the eighth Thursday of 1922?", and "Is 9000 a leap year?". If you're like me, the answer is clearly no. Nevertheless, there's a remote chance that someday a question like this will arise and...

Over the past few months, I have had a number of questions about the Excel 2007 viewer – mostly, will there be an Excel 2007 viewer, and when will it be ready. (For those that are not familiar with the term “viewer”, viewers are applications that Microsoft provides for free that enable people who do not have Office programs to open and look at Office files. There are viewers available for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and they work with files created in any version of Office between Office 97 and...

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...