Today’s author is Mike Alexander, an Excel MVP who shows us how to run a Stored Procedure to get data from a SQL server. For more useful articles and videos, visit www.datapigtechnologies.com . We all know we can use MS Query to get data from a SQL server. Typically though, we pull from a Table or a View. Well in some organizations, the IT department wants all interaction with the server to be done through Stored Procedure. This adds a level of risk management and makes the DBAs feel better...

One thing that we hear from customers is that they would like to be able to re-use Excel spreadsheets in web portals and dashboards simply and without needing to write a bunch of custom code. For example, they have business people (financial analysts, business planners, engineers) that create content in Excel that they would like to re-use and share in a portal or dashboard, but to do so is technically quite challenging. (For those that are not familiar with the term, “dashboard” is generally used...

Every release, part of what the team (and the entire company) does when working on a new release of Excel is use it in all sorts of ways (often referred to as “dogfooding”). We use it in our daily work, we build solutions that the team uses to manage the development process, we help other folks inside MSFT (finance, sales, marketing, etc.) upgrade their workbooks and build solutions, etc. Almost all of this work is focused on running the business at Microsoft, and the goal is to make sure the product...

Thanks to Diego Oppenheimer for putting together this post. In today’s post I will be covering a couple of smaller PivotTable features that we incorporated in Excel 2010. Most of these features have been longstanding customer requests or pain points that we felt could be addressed in this release. This includes fixing functionality that worked in versions of Excel previous to Excel 2007 (Filtering on calculated members) as well as making it easier to access features that historically our users have...

A few posts back when I provided an overview of our work in the area of “better looking documents”, I mentioned that two of our goals were to “Make it easy to see what your work will look like printed as you create it “ and “Make it easier to maintain your spreadsheet and update formatting”. I also mentioned that we had added a new view to Excel – “A new view – Page Layout View - to supplement Normal and Page Break Preview”. In today’s post, I wanted to cover Page Layout View. Excel’s Normal view...

Ask most of your friends how they're doing, and they'll probably tell you how hectic their lives are. You may feel that way too. Sometimes just thinking about balancing work and family can be exhausting. A lot of you use and love Excel at work. It makes tasks faster, it keeps you organized, and it adds insight into all that data that surrounds you.

You may already be taking advantage of those same Excel benefits at home too. After all, as many of us know, sometimes keeping a handle on data at work is easier than managing our family budgets.

Today we want to highlight a really great family budget template.

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In the post last week on Page Layout view , some of you may have noticed the words “Click to add header” in a few of the screenshots, which was a hint that there have been some changes in headers and footers in Excel 2007. I am going to review those changes, as well as a few other minor printing tweaks, in this post. When we added Page Layout view to Excel, we wanted to make it easier for users to see their work within the context of a printed page, thereby simplifying the process of getting work...

Conditional Formatting is a feature that allows users to apply formatting to cell(s) automatically depending on the value of the cell or the value of a formula. This is a handy feature, making it easy to highlight certain values (“all test scores below 50% turn red”), or make particular cells easy to identify (“all the tasks assigned to Dave turn green”). It is also a powerful feature, given that conditions can be based on any Excel formula. Users that know about the feature love it, and many book...

In addition to improving the formula editing UI in Excel 12, the team has spent some time adding to Excel’s function library. Over the years, customers have found new ways to combine and leverage the functions in Excel to build all sorts of things, but there remain many areas where our customers would like to see need new capability. This release, we have targeted three areas in which to improve our function library – the Analysis ToolPak, SQL Server Analysis Services, and the most common requests...

Thanks to Eric Patterson for writing this blog post. As promised in our Programmability Improvements in Excel 2010 , here are more details about the Excel 2010 improvements to aid in migrating Excel 4 Macros to VBA. Excel has a macro facility, known as Excel 4 macros (XLM for short) that was the primary macro language prior to the introduction of VBA in Excel 5.0. Most people have long since migrated their Excel 4 macros to VBA; however, some Excel 4 macro capabilities were missing from VBA, which...