Today we have a “guest post” from our Documentation Team – the folks that bring you help, content on the web, etc. They have a few open positions they are looking to fill. Enjoy. I want to relay information from our documentation group today (more specifically its "Data" team) and let you know that we’re looking for 2 programmer-writers to help us build Excel developer content. If you are as passionate about Excel as you are about its help system for developers, these positions will hopefully be...

A few weeks ago I posted a series of articles about great-looking documents. I have had a few questions about shapes since I wrote those posts, so I thought I would write a quick post on changes to shapes in Excel 2007 (and Office 2007 really – anything I write here applies to all the apps). Much the same way that charts were improved (new great-looking visuals, results-oriented ribbon UI), shapes have been improved as well. Here is a summary of the changes, which fall into a number of categories...

Whenever we talk to users about PivotCharts, the first request we hear is that they behave more like regular charts. In previous versions, PivotCharts had very limited layout and formatting options. In addition, if you refreshed the PivotTable that the PivotChart was based upon, the PivotChart would lose whatever formatting it had. We heard from many users that they would often just create regular charts instead of PivotCharts, since could be problematic As PivotTables and charts changed in Excel...

One thing we know is that many of the charts that folks created in Excel end up in PowerPoint presentations or Word documents (I think the statistic is that 50% of all charts in PowerPoint presentations originate from Excel. While users work in Excel to analyze their data, the final results are often given to others, and they rarely want to include all the intermediate steps from Excel. Furthermore, users have all kinds of solutions to transfer their charts. Most just use copy and paste, but some...

In the previous two charting posts, I wrote about how you can make a professional chart with four simple choices – chart type, chart layout, chart style, and document theme. As useful as we hope that is, we know that some users will want to tweak and control every aspect of their charts. Today I want to walk through the tabs that are available when you are working with a chart and provide an overview of all the capabilities that are exposed in the ribbon. I am also going to briefly cover templates...

Keyboard Access Today I want to start with a link to Jensen Harris' UI blog, where Jensen has put up a post that describes the Office 2007 keyboard model . I am personally a big keyboard user, and I know the same is true for a lot of Excel users, so this is a topic that is near and dear to my heart. You can read the details for yourselves, but I want to summarize the key design points. Every one of the Office 2003 keyboard shortcuts (i.e. CTRL+B) continues to work the same in Office 2007; there's...

A few posts ago when I described the work we did in the area of “great looking documents” , I mentioned charting. I am going to spend the next week or two covering charting in detail. For this first two posts, I want to cover how we have used the ribbon to make it possible, with no more than 3-4 clicks, to create a wide variety of professional-looking charts. When talking to customers about charting in Excel, one of the big pieces of feedback we hear is how hard it is to make a chart that looks ready...

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...

BioIT Alliance I haven’t spent a lot of time on the new Excel file formats, since Brian Jones is writing a blog on that subject , but I saw a story today on Brian's blog that was interesting, so I thought I would share it with you. Specifically, he posted a story about an industry group getting ready to take advantage of the Open XML formats for their business solutions. The newly announced BioIT alliance was formed to help connect the pharmaceutical, biotechnology, hardware, and software industries...

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...