In this article, I’ll cover a small yet very useful PivotTable feature – deferring PivotTable updates. In current versions of Excel, PivotTables are updated each time a field is added, removed, or moved to a different position. For PivotTables based on large data sets, these actions can take some time to complete, meaning, for example, you end up waiting 7 times if you create a new a PivotTable and add 7 fields. To address this scenario, we have added a feature to Excel 12 that allows you to control...

In a series of previous articles I introduced the new conditional formatting capabilities in Excel 12 (see here for the whole series of posts). Today I want to add one more article to the series, which is the work we have done to make conditional formatting work really well in Excel PivotTables. This is an area that I love to show people, because the work we have done reduces a formerly-tricky task down to a few clicks. The first point I want to make is that all the features we added around new types...

As I mentioned a few articles back, PivotTables enable users to summarize data in an easy-to-read report. Once a user has a summary of something they are interested in, they often want to further explore their data by seeing it ordered differently, by excluding certain records, by seeing the top 10 of something, etc. PivotTable’s sorting and filtering capabilities are great for this sort of work, and we have done a lot of work in this area in Excel 12, so I wanted to review the highlights. Today...

Today I wanted to talk about PivotTable context menus, for two reasons … first, because we have updated them to make them more useful, and second, because we have added some neat new features that are exposed primarily in context menus. All of this is part of our work to make PivotTables easier to explore and manipulate. Let’s take a look at some of the improvements and additions. Sorting by items on rows or columns Below is a screenshot of the context menu for an item on rows or columns (we have...

As I mentioned a few posts back, one of the key goals for PivotTables in Excel 12 was to use the Ribbon and new dialogs to expose PivotTables’ capabilities to a much broader range of users. Today I want to take a closer look at the new user interface – especially the ribbon – and how we have tried to make commonly-used features and functions much more visible and available with very few clicks of the mouse. I am also going to briefly cover some changes and additions to the PivotTable Options and...

Today, I would like to cover some of the improvements we made in Excel 12 to make PivotTables easier to read and explore. Expand Collapse One of the nice exploration features of PivotTables is the ability to expand and collapse items in order to view values at different levels of detail. In Excel 12, we have added expand/collapse indicators to the PivotTable to make it easy to discover when there are more details to explore (and to make it obvious that this feature even exists!). The expand indicator...

One of the goals we had for our PivotTable work in Excel 12 was to make creating PivotTables a much more approachable task. In this post, I would like to walk through an example of creating a PivotTable in order to highlight the changes we have made in Excel 12. In general, we tried to make the process simpler and more intuitive. As I said in the previous post, PivotTables are great for summarizing large amounts of data. For example, a user might have a table full of sales data (contained in a query...

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 (the name “PivotTable” is derived from the fact that the process of rearranging your data is known as “pivoting” your data). To illustrate the core capability of PivotTables...

Before I dive into PivotTables, I thought I would mention an Excel 12 feature that resulted from collaboration with our international subsidiaries. Users that work outside North America (and even some users that work within North America) build a lot of spreadsheets that contain multiple currencies. To make this easier for folks, we’ve turned the “$” (or Currency Style) button into a split-button drop-down that contains a list of different currencies the user can select. The feature is pretty straightforward...

In the second article I wrote about Excel Services , I discussed the scenarios that we are targeting with this initial release and also a few scenarios that we will not support. Today I wanted to provide further detail on the latter – specifically, the Excel 12 features that will not be supported in our first version of Excel Services. Excel 12 is a feature-rich application, and it was not possible to support every one of Excel 12’s features in our first version of Excel Services. Instead, we focused...