I have received a few emails from folks that have downloaded the beta and tried out multi-threaded calculation – thanks, it was great to hear from you. One thing I wanted to point out is that for most workbooks, you will see the maximum improvement in performance the second time you calculate a workbook (you will still see a good improvement in the first calculation – it is just there will be further improvement in the second calculation). The reason is that there is a bit of work to be done when...

A few days ago, I outlined some changes that had been made to Tools|Options. Today, I wanted to run through how the options were organized for those of you that are curious, and point out one other feature I forgot to mention Monday. Since we already looked at the “Personalize” tab, let’s start with the Formulas tab. (Click to enlarge) As you can see, the most commonly changed options are available here. (Harlan, I think you made a comment about many of the options on the “Personalize” tab being...

In previous posts, I have talked about new features we have added around chart styles and table styles . These features, as you may or may not recall, are designed to make it easy to apply good-looking formatting and to create consistent-looking documents. We are in the process of finalizing the content for these styles, so we are looking for some help from readers of this blog. Below is a link to a survey on the consistency of a number of table and chart styles. The survey takes 10-15 minutes to...

Starting today, those of you that are interested can download the public Office 2007 Beta from the Office preview site using this link: http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/beta/getthebeta.mspx . For those that do download and check things out, please let us know what you think.

In the course of writing this blog, between comments and direct emails, I would estimate that I have fielded over 1,000 questions. Of those, only one had anything to do with Tools|Options, which I found to be a surprisingly low number, given how often I hear people comment about it when I am talking to customers on the road. Like most of the UI in Office2007, Tools|Options has had a significant makeover (it is gone, really, replaced by a new design). Today I want to give an overview of those changes...

Short post tonight. Several of my recent posts have been written in Word. The beta2 version of Word 2007 includes blog support, which means you can write in Word and output blog-compatible HTML. Word supports publishing text and pictures to many common blog servers. More info available on the Word blog .

Here is the second guest post from Matthew Kotler, a lead program manager on the SmartArt team. In the last post, I presented an overview of SmartArt Graphics. In this post, I'll show how to take the basic SmartArt Graphic that you have created and format it to make it really stand out (or subtly fit in, depending on your goal). Just like cells, tables, and shapes, SmartArt Graphics build on the rich functionality of document themes. When you insert a SmartArt Graphic into your spreadsheet (or document...

A few weeks ago a few folks sent me email asking about what the new shapes features meant for things like org charts and other diagrams. Today we have the answer in the form of the first of two guest posts from Matthew Kotler, a lead program manager on the SmartArt team. The impact of graphics in spreadsheets, documents, and presentations is significant, improving comprehension and recall of information. Yet, the vast majority of content created within Office is textual and with today's tools it...

Spreadsheets today support critical business processes, from financial reporting and analysis to research and development. As a result, they have become an important enterprise resource that must be included when addressing compliance requirements. Some of the more recent regulations like Section 404 of the Sarbanes Oxley Act even offer specific guidance around spreadsheets supporting financial reporting processes. Over the past year, we’ve talked with customers, regulators, and solution providers...

Since a few of the comments that were made on the last post were more easily answered with pictures, I thought I would just go ahead and make a new post out of it. (I have answered the other comments in the comments section of the previous post.) Biff commented “ That 2nd screencap with all those icons applied looks like a real mess. I would not want to see that in any of my spreadsheets. ” Actually, Biff, my example wasn’t the greatest – that is not how I suspect that most people will use Icon Sets...