Yesterday we looked at Table Styles . Today, I wanted to revisit PivotTable Styles (see a post here where I introduced PivotTable styles a few months ago – you might want to re-read that before proceeding). This post will be a bit shorter, because most of what I talked about yesterday with respect to Table Styles is also true for PivotTable Styles. PivotTable Styles have the same design goals as Table Styles, and they also have the same user model and customization story. Here is a shot of the PivotTable...

Last post we looked at Cell Styles – both the changes we made to the feature as well as the set of Cell Styles that will ship in the Office public beta. Today, I wanted to revisit another (completely new) set of styles that are part of Excel 2007 – Table Styles. Long-time Excel blog readers will remember I already described Table styles to a large extent. There is a whole category of posts on Tables (new to Excel 2007) here , and there is a post on Table Styles specifically here , so folks might...

A few posts ago, I presented an overview of the work we are doing in the area of great looking documents . Over the next few posts, I want to walk through a number of the improvements we have made to styles. Today, let’s cover Cell Styles. “Cell Styles” were introduced in Excel v3. The basic idea, much like styles in Word (and other products), was to give users the ability to create and apply styles to cells, which accrued a few benefits. First, it gave users a way to create a consistent-looking...

For those of you interested in programming Excel Services, check out this blog . One of the developers (Shahar) working on Excel Services team has posted an article that walks through the details of programmatically working with a workbook using Excel Services. There are both C# and VB.NET samples available. I think Shahar plans to cover a range of topics over the coming months, so if you are interested, keep watching his site.

Last time, we looked at what a Document Theme (“theme”) was, some of the places it shows up in the Excel UI, and a few examples of why themes are useful. Today I wanted to cover how to change, create, and modify themes, how to tweak themes, and themes and templates. Changing and Creating Themes Not everyone is going to like the default theme we ship out of the box, corporations and individuals are going to want to create their own themes, and some users will want special themes for special purposes...

In the last post, I presented an overview of the work we are doing in the area of “great looking documents”. Over the next few posts, I want to walk through a number of the improvements in a bit more detail. Today, I am going to introduce the idea of Document Themes, because a lot of the other features that I am going to discuss are tied into document themes in one way or another. To put it in the simplest terms, a Document Theme (or “theme” for the remainder of this post) is a new way to specify...

As many of you have noticed, all the images disappeared from the Excel 2007 blog sometime last night (Pacific Time). We hope to have them back soon. In the meantime, you might want to check out Jensen's latest post which discusses an example of a change made by the UI team in reaction to beta feedback.

One of the themes we focused on with Office 2007 was “great looking documents”. For the next half-dozen articles, I am going to explain what that means for Excel, and some of the cross-application features that users will see in Office 2007. Way back when we were starting planning for Excel 2007, we talked to a lot of people about the documents they created using Office, and we looked at many, many examples of people’s work. We asked them about what they found difficult, what they would like to see...

While we are talking about the new user interface, I thought I would mention another feature the user interface team has added that I think will prove to be very helpful to a lot of users. The basic idea is to take tooltips, which are useful little devices, and add some additional capabilities. Let’s briefly walk through a few examples. When you hover over a command in the ribbon in Excel 2007, you will see the name of the feature and they keyboard shortcut (if one exists) (note, we have not been...

The Final Look For most of the history of this blog, I have been showing you screenshots produced using “Beta 1” builds of Excel 2007 and making comments along the lines of “not final UI”. Today, the UI became a lot more final. What do I mean? This morning at the CeBIT conference in Germany, Microsoft publicly showcased what will be the final visuals for the Office 2007 user interface. Here is a screenshot of Excel. (Click to enlarge) There is another “skin” available too. (Click to enlarge) There...