Today we have the third guest post from Sam Radakovitz, Excel Program Manager. Sam is writing about the Trust Centre, a new feature for Office 2007. Our goal is to have secured and reasonable default settings to allow customers get most work done while staying safe, however, from time to time there is also value in being able to easily and quickly verify that your settings remain secure. In previous versions of Office, checking one’s security settings was often a significant challenge due to the...

Today we have the second guest post from Sam Radakovitz, Excel Program Manager. Sam is writing about the Trust Centre, a new feature for Office 2007. Prior to Office 2007 the Office security model has had solid success in helping combat things like macro viruses, but that has come at a price for legitimate macros and for customers who didn’t care about macros at all. To even open a document you first had to “get past” a prompt something like the following: (Click to enlarge) As mentioned the customer...

Guest writer: Sam Radakovitz. Over the next several posts, Sam Radakovitz, one of the members of the Excel Program Management team, is going to explain a new feature in Office 2007 called the “Trust Centre”. While Sam will be discussing the Trust Centre in the context of Excel, it is a feature that has been implemented across Office (Word, Access, PowerPoint, etc.), so you can apply much of what Sam has written about there as well. Enjoy. Security means different things to different people and even...

There were some questions in the comments in the last few days about working with the Ribbon minimized (which I do a lot, but not exclusively). In a nice piece of chance timing, Jensen wrote a short piece (UI blog) on how the Ribbon has been improved in this area post-beta. Please check it out: https://blogs.msdn.com/jensenh/archive/2006/07/20/672345.aspx . The post includes a short movie so you can see the auto-collapsing behaviour he explains in the post.

To this point in the blog, I haven't talked too much about the file formats that Excel 2007 uses, since Brian Jones has been covering the new Office Open XML format pretty well in his blog. Today I thought I'd give an overview of the three main formats that we have in Excel 2007. File Format Number 1 - Office Open XML (XLSX, XLSM, XLTX, XLTM, and XLAM files) The Office Open XML format is a full fidelity (all features of the product are supported) file format for Excel 2007, and it is the default...

Yesterday I wrote about some work I was doing with Tables recently. Today I want to do the same for conditional formatting – specifically, using colour scales. (For a refresher, or for those that are new to this blog, you can read up on changes to conditional formatting in this series of blog posts , and you can read specifically about colour scales here ). In this case, I was looking at a table that contained the results of a set of tests. The table looked like this (again, I made up the data for...

A few weeks ago when I asked readers what they wanted to see in the way of content over the next few months, a few people suggested some discussion about everyday use. Accordingly, I am going to write today about some things I was doing with Tables in Excel 2007, and tomorrow I will try to write a bit about conditional formatting. Specifically, what I want to walk through with regard to tables was using calculated columns and structured referencing. (For those that are new to the blog or who need...

Since I have been writing this blog, I have periodically been asked “what’s up with the Office Web Components”. Today, I wanted to post the official “roadmap” from the Office Web Components team. Here you go: As some of you have recently noticed, the Office Web Components are no longer installed when installing Microsoft Office 2007. The Office Web Components (OWC) are a set of ActiveX® controls that provide four principal components: Spreadsheet, Chart, PivotTable®, and Data Source Control (DSC...

Some XLL add-ins may gain a performance boost if they take into account the worksheet context that calls them. For example, if a function is called from a sheet that is not currently active, and the rest of the workbook does not have dependencies on the results that the function returns to that sheet – then the function may choose to skip its calculation. This way, only the calls within the active sheet actually take up compute time. In order to do this optimization, the XLL code needs to be able...

Today we have a guest post from Sander Viegers, a user experience designer who worked on many aspects of Excel 2007. Hi, my name is Sander Viegers. I am user experience designer in the Office Design Group. I’ve had the pleasure of working with the Excel team on Excel 2007. In this blog entry I would like to provide some insight into how I contributed as a user experience designer. Since charting seems to be a highly popular topic on this blog, I’ll focus on the creation of the new charting experience...