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Some of you may have seen earlier today that Microsoft announced an investment in Business Intelligence across the Microsoft Office System with Excel 12 at the hub. You can watch the presentation and demo here.
I have talked already about some of the Excel 12 features that support this investment, and I will be talking a lot more about others over the next few months. Specifically, over the next few weeks I will talk about:
Comments: (9) Collapse
David
I'm looking forward to the Analysis Services stuff, but does this mean you have finished formula building improvements?
I was hoping you might mention new functionality around creating User Defined Functions (in worksheets?)
Q: will there be a way to define a complex worksheet function once, and reuse that definition many times without resorting to VBA or another programming language?
cheers
Simon
The SQL Server Analytical Services functions would necessarily be irrelevant to anyone working for a company that uses databases other than SQL Server.
Does the focus on SQL Server and the presumably intentional omission of XLODBC.XLA/SQL.REQUEST from XL11 mean that XL12, like XL11, will come without any means of pulling data from generic (i.e., possibly non-Microsoft) ODBC data sources other than rolling your own wrapper udfs around ADO in VBA?
The presentation link doesn't seem to be working. It says the recording ID or Password may be incorrect.
I too am interested in seeing advancements in User-Defined Functions and the VBA scripting area in general. I'd love to see at a minimum it get scrollwheel support. I think it's rather rediculous that we're expected to work in it, when it's been essenially forgotten. The major improvement I'd like to see however in that realm is being able to write .Net UDFs. There have been many instances where I'd like some functionality that .Net provides in my Excel workbook from a business intelligence model. Web Service data retrieval and such.
Somewhere deep down I hope someone at Microsoft is working on bringing the Office object model into the .Net world. But I know if you are, you couldn't tell me about it.
Can't wait to see the pivot table improvements! When can we add the cumulative percentage (run total of x divided by run total of y) as a Show Option. This is a heavily needed data option but have to create outside pivottable today.
Does "Excel Services" mean Excel running on a server? We've spent a lot of time and effort on getting Excel to work on a server in a sensible way and it'd be great to throw all that code away and go to a production quality microsoft codebase (genuinely, lots of really kludgy win32 api calls and a ton of monitoring to see if Excel is still working).
I'll know you'll get to it, but I am on tenterhooks here!
Orion
You can write .net worksheet functions now (.net 2003 excel xp or 2003) using a class library project. You just register for COM interop and include a couple of registry functions.
The following books have full info:
.net development for office by Andrew Whitechapel
visual studio tools for office Eric Carter and Eric Lippert.
both very recommended
There are also full instructions including a basic class on our site:
www.codematic.net - look on the visual studio page.
I agree on the VBIDE, I hope its not going to be overlooked just to make VSTO/VSTA look better.
Howdy,
Simon – No news on UDFs without writing VBA this release. Please feel free to send me your thoughts on what you would like to see (scenarios, capabilities) in future versions. Thanks for the pointers for Orion.
Harlan – The SQL AS functions work against SQL Server Analysis Services, correct, but let me clarify that the data can come from non-SQL Server databases. SQL Server Analysis Services is a technology that lets end users view and analyze large volumes of data (there are a number of benefits that you get from using SQL AS – exposing friendly business terminology not database field names; fast performance; data is enriched with business logic like fiscal vs. calendar date or the company structure; and a single view on an enterprise’s data). The data, however, can come from a variety of different databases - Oracle, DB2, Teradata , Jet, etc. – so strictly speaking, many customers will use SQL AS functions to get to data that is ultimately stored in non-SQL Server relational databases.
Ted – I have made the appropriate folks aware and hopefully it will be working again soon.
Tianwei – More information coming soon.
John – Yes, you can think of Excel Services in that manner; much more detail coming soon.
Ted - Demo link fixed and working now.
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