You can use your favorite social network to register or link an existing account:
Or use your email address to register without a social network:
Sign in with these social networks:
Or enter your username and password
Forgot your password?
Yes, please link my existing account with for quick, secure access.
No, I would like to create a new account with my profile information.
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 team has been doing publicly. I plan to write this blog from now until around the general availability of Office 12, and I am hoping to talk in some depth about all the different features we have added to Excel 12. As things unfold, I look forward to reading your comments and hearing suggestions on what would you would like to read about.
With that said, let’s finish this initial post with some discussion of a feature.
Probably the most common question the Excel team gets from our customers is “when are you going to add more rows/more columns/more rows and more columns”. There are many different scenarios behind these requests. Some customers want to be able to analyze more data than Excel has rows, some customers want to track more daily information than Excel has columns, and other customers want to perform matrix math on large matrices of thousands of elements. There are plenty of other scenarios too. Well, the answer to the question is “in Excel 12.” Specifically, the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That’s 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV.
This is an exciting feature for us, because it is a feature that helps a very broad range of our customers, and we are looking forward to seeing what folks create with a bigger grid.
Of course, rows and columns aren’t the only things customers have been asking for more of. Next time, I will review all of the other places where Excel 12 gives you “more”.
Comments: (31) Collapse
<>
Wow! I'll be looking forward to learning how we'll be able to navigate that... :-)
Hi David,
Great news! This is one feature change I have been waiting for for more than a decade!
Regards,
Ja Karel Pieterse
Excel MVP
Wow, that's a great start to your blog.
A couple of questions:
1. If I have a named range of XX123, will my formula =XX123 then refer to the cell reference or to the named reference?
2. Which approach will you take to resolve this issue? Conflicting names checker or an xl2003 compatibility mode?
Thanks,
Rob
Thank you!
Q. Will the number of unique elements in a pivot table expand as well?
J-walk is also covering Excel 12 in his blog.
Hope to get even more useful info here.
But what if I want 45 columns for every day of the year? Just kidding. Great first post. This feature was so universally desired, I think, that you may have set the bar too high. Or maybe the rest of the new features are just that good. I look forward to reading.
Thank you indeed.
What about VBA - will be supported? There is a lot of rumours about future this enviroment.
Could you tell us more about that?
Best Regards
Jiri Cihar
Just out of interest: why 16,384? At least it's a power of 2 (2^14), I suppose!
Are you guys considering multi-threading the core libraries? Lots of yummy dual-coreness to be slurped up by the time Office 12 hits the stores.
-James
Greats!!
I'm wainting for more elements in Pivot Tables to work with texts in data.
-Marcos Martins
Over 1 million rows! WOW! That's the best news I've heard all week about anything.
David
Thanks for the post - glad to see a bit of info appearing - we're all pretty keen to see whats in store.
Bigger, harder to maintain Monsters??
Are you going to have worksheet based user defined functions to help people simplify those monster VLOOKUP/INDEX/OFFSET formulas?
cheers
Simon
I would like to see a Duplicate function, instead of having to write a custom formula every time, or create a Wizard that will walk people through the process. Hopefully you've increased the cell character display limitation (1024). I work at a help desk, and these are some of the most frequent questions I get. I constantly have to remind my customers that Excel is not a word processor. Otherwise, the Row / Column increases sound fantastic, as it will reduce support calls for Access, which has a much higher learning curve.
Wow that's great -- I can't wait to hear more.
But can my fellow blog readers pah-lease give David a wee bit of breathing room and NOT bombard him with your questions????
Why have a restriction on number of rows and columns at all?
There is no restriction on how long a MS Word document can be, so why should Excel be different?
Comments: (loading) Collapse