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...

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...

This post is all about IF--not the poem by Rudyard Kipling, or the 1971 hit song by Bread, but the function. The IF function is used in many Office programs, but most of us know it from Microsoft Excel:

IF(logical_test, [value_if_true], [value_if_false])

IF is one of the most searched-for words on Office.com, so we thought we’d compile some of our resources on IF so you can find them more easily.

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Today's author: David Gainer, a Program Manager on the Excel team. PivotTables are designed to help users make sense of large amounts of data by providing an easy way to build a summarized report. In addition, PivotTables can be rearranged easily, so that once you have some summary data in a PivotTable, you can look at the same information in many different ways with only a few mouse clicks. For a slightly less brief overview of PivotTables as well as a list of the improvements made to the application...

Today’s author is, Ron de Bruin, an Excel MVP . You can find more useful tips from Ron and links to Excel add-ins at his website: http://www.rondebruin.nl/ There are four primary week numbering systems in use worldwide. Each system has subtle differences that you should be aware of. Excel can work with any of these systems: 1)  ISO Week number: The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) ISO8601:2000 Standard. All weeks begin on a Monday. Week one starts on Monday of the first week...

Guest writer: Eric Patterson. Over the next several posts, Eric, one of the members of the Excel Program Management team, is going to discuss backwards compatibility in Excel 2007. I hope readers find this interesting. Over the next several posts I will describe the features that we have built-in to Excel 2007 to make it easy to migrate from previous versions. If you’ve been reading along with this blog, you should have a good picture of the scope of the changes that we are making in this release...

Today's author: Mark Gillis, an Excel and SharePoint writer, who's been through six versions of Office, survived to tell the tale, and picked up a thing or two along the way. Excel doesn't have an easy way to append multiple text files into one worksheet through the user interface. From time to time I hear customers asking how to do this in an easy way. Do you have to use Access or VB code to solve this problem? No. There's a way to do it in Excel by using a simple SQL statement in the connection...

Following MacWorld earlier this week, there has been some inaccurate information circulating online regarding VBA support in Office for Windows. While it’s true that VBA isn't supported in the latest version of Office for the Mac and the VBA licensing program did close to new customers last year, we have no plans to remove VBA from future versions of Office for Windows. We understand that VBA is a critical capability for large numbers of our customers; accordingly, there is no plan to remove VBA...

Today's author: Allan Folting, a program manager who works on the Excel team. I have gotten lots of questions from customers around specific functionality in Microsoft Excel 2007 PivotTables that is missing when connected to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services Service Pack 2 cubes: Filtering individual calculated members Showing non-visual totals when filtering I have also gotten lots of requests for the ability to add calculations to OLAP PivotTables using the object model, specifically...

One of our goals with tables was to create a set of features that reduce the overall maintenance required to keep a spreadsheet functioning well over time. This involves making spreadsheets less prone to error, as well as making them more understandable days, months, and years after the spreadsheet was created. Rethinking the interaction between tables and formulas proved to be an important part of meeting that goal. As many readers have presaged, Excel 12 provides some new ways to reference tables...