Today’s author is Jan Karel Pieterse, an Excel MVP, who describes the process of importing text in great detail. You can find more useful tips from Jan Karel on his website: http://www.jkp-ads.com/ . In this article, I'll explain how to ease importing of .txt, .prn and/or .csv files into an existing sheet in Excel. Introduction If you've ever tried to open a text file, you have probably used the Text import wizard. If you have ever opened a CSV file, you have probably noted you can't set up...

Today's author, Ben Rampson, a Program Manager on the Excel team. Customers who author charts in presentations and reports often spend a significant amount of effort modifying their charts to get them looking just the way they want. While the new Chart Style and Chart Layout features in Office 2007 provide some great one-click options to quickly alter the appearance of a chart, there are still times when one needs to modify a chart even further. A company policy may require that a chart use particular...

If you want to look up a value in a table using one criteria, it's simple. You can use a plain VLOOKUP formula. But if you want to use more than one criteria, what can you do? There are lots of ways using several Excel functions such as VLOOKUP, LOOKUP, MATCH, INDEX, etc. In this blog post, I'll show you a few of those ways.

...

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...

Exploring large data sets and creating filters has never been easier than with Excel 2010. Tables, PivotTables and PivotCharts now have a new search functionality that easily enables you to find what you need, filter and repeat for a faster more efficient way of navigating those enormous data sets. Filtering FAST! In Excel 2010 when you click on the dropdown for autofilters, tables, PivotTables and PivotCharts you will now find a new search interface that enable swift navigation of extremely large...

One of the program managers on my team (Charlie) has put together a list of 214 keyboard shortcuts available in Excel. While it isn’t exhaustive (for example, it doesn’t cover shortcuts available in dialogs), I find it a useful presentation of the shortcuts that are available when performing basic editing in Excel, so I thought I would share it with you. If you click the picture below, you will access a PDF file which you can download and print. (The PDF was generated by a recent build of Microsoft...

Thanks to Karen Cheng for putting together this series on Slicers. New to Excel 2010 are slicers, which are visual controls that allow you to quickly and easily filter your data in an interactive way. They float above the grid, like charts and shapes. Here’s an example of the same slicer in three different states. You can select one, all, or some countries. A slicer acts like a report filter, so you can hook it up to a PivotTable, PivotChart, or CUBE function to create an interactive report...

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...

Today’s author: Chad Rothschiller, a program manager on the Excel team. Chad is going to discuss using formulas to 'clean up' data in Excel. Overview Excel is a great tool to use when you need to take data in one format, manipulate it into another format, and push the results along to another process, e.g. a database. In this context, Excel is a great landing pad or middle man, serving as a data transformation tool to move data from one system to another. This example considers a sample data set...

Since I have had some comments and emails asking about how the new conditional formatting features could be accessed using VBA, I wanted to provide a few brief examples. One of the Excel team’s principles is that when we add new features, we make sure that they are available programmatically as well as in the user interface. The Excel 12 object model, accordingly, supports all conditional formatting functionality that is supported in the UI. This includes creating, editing, or deleting rules, or...