Today Eric Patterson finishes his series of posts on compatibility. For my last post about compatibility, I would like to drill down into more detail on Excel’s PivotTable feature. In Excel 2007, we have invested a lot of our time improving PivotTables. If you are just joining, you can find a number of blog posts describing that work here . With all of the changes to PivotTables in Excel 12, it is important to understand how files containing PivotTables can be shared between versions of Excel. PivotTable...

Today Eric Patterson continues his discussion on Compatibility. Last week I described the features that we have deprecated for Excel 2007 . Today I want to expand on that list to include the features related to Charting in Office 2007. There has been a lot of work in Office 2007 to move charting to use a shared Office drawing layer. David has devoted a number of past blog posts on charting that describe all of this work. Reasons for change? As with other features in Excel, we never deprecate Chart...

Today Eric Patterson returns with a few more guest posts on Compatibility. Thus far the discussion about compatibility has been focused on how new features in Excel 2007 are handled when saving files to previous versions or when working in Compatibility Mode. The flip side of the discussion is the list of features that are being deprecated for Excel 2007. That will be the topic for today’s post. Why Remove Anything? Before jumping to the list of which features are being deprecated or removed, let...

Over the course of this blog, I think I have covered to some degree every tab in Excel 2007 except for the Add-Ins tab. Accordingly, today, I wanted to present some information on the Add-Ins tab. It turns out that there is already some good information out there on the Add-Ins tab, so here are some links. Jensen’s UI blog has a good post here . And MSDN has some information here . The basic idea is that all existing solutions and custom toolbars will continue to run in Office 2007, with the UI ending...

Today we have a second guest post from Sander Viegers, a user experience designer who worked on many aspects of Excel 2007. Sander’s previous post is located here . In my previous guest post (thanks for all the feedback) I talked about the holistic design approach to redesigning the entire charting experience. In this blog post, I would like to give an example of a very specific design problem: getting the data to show up correctly on your chart. Same Data – Two Different Charts The problem we were...

We are interested in getting some user feedback on how conditional formatting (Data Bars specifically – see here for some info on Data Bars) should behave when the sheet direction is set to right-to-left (RTL). (Background for those not familiar with RTL - when a sheet direction is set to RTL, cell A1 is at the top-right corner as opposed to the top-left corner ... see two images below – the one on the left is regular left-to-right sheet orientation, the one on the right is RTL.) Excel has an RTL...

In the Office UI blog, Jensen recently authored a post describing the improvements that had been made to the "recently opened documents list" in Office 2007. This is something that I was going to cover this month, but now I don’t have to, because Jensen has. For those interested, I would suggest reading his blog post here . In a nutshell, we tried to address a few key problems – there were too few entries (4 by default), important ones scrolled off the list, and long file paths could make all entries...

Today we have another guest post from Sam Radakovitz (Sam brought you a number of posts on the Trust Centre as well as an Excel 2007 game ). Today, Sam talks a bit about Forms Controls and an example of the sort of thing you can do with them. Note – this is possible in current versions of Excel too. This one off blog post is about forms controls. Many people don’t know it, but there are quite a few things you can do with the forms controls in Excel. I’ll start off by giving a brief description of...

Eric is out for a few days, so there is going to be a temporary break in the compatibility posts (they will resume sometime next week). In the meantime, I thought I would quickly review a few tabs that I have not talked about yet and potentially one or two other items. Today, I wanted to briefly review the Developer tab. As part of the general redesign of Office UI, a decision was taken that by default, features used primarily by solution developers would not be visible in the UI – they would be...

Today we have the third guest post from Eric Patterson, Excel Program Manager. Eric is writing about compatibility in Excel 2007. Conditional Formatting is one of the areas where we have made a lot of improvements in for Excel 2007. Dave has already described in previous posts what we have done; here is a recap of our investments: Three new visualizations – “data bars”, “color scales”, and “icon sets” New UI for adding, removing, and managing conditional formats New conditional formatting “rules...