When we started Excel 2007, we made a decision that as part of increasing the grid size, we were going to address a lot of important other “limits” in the product. The entire list can be seen here, in the second post I ever made to this blog . (Note, this is probably a good place to note that we had to back out the change to “The number of characters that can be stored and displayed in a cell formatted as Text” recently – we found a problem with the implementation that couldn’t be fixed at this late...

Over the past few months, I have had a number of questions about the Excel 2007 viewer – mostly, will there be an Excel 2007 viewer, and when will it be ready. (For those that are not familiar with the term “viewer”, viewers are applications that Microsoft provides for free that enable people who do not have Office programs to open and look at Office files. There are viewers available for Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, and they work with files created in any version of Office between Office 97 and...

The other night at home, I was doing some work at home, I ran across a situation where I wished that our “Data Validation” functionality and “Pick From List” were integrated – specifically, it would have been really nice if, after I set up Data Validation on a range, Excel recognized when I was typing an entry from the list of valid possible entries. Here’s an example. Say I was categorizing some expenses in this Table, and I have set up Data Validation on the last column to make sure I do not mis...

Today we have a guest post from Andy Tischaefer. Andy works on the Office Programmability team. Andy is going to talk a bit about a change in behaviour using Office 2007 and how you can turn the clock back if you want to. In prior versions of Office (since Office2000 at least), Office documents (ppt, xls, doc and others) navigated to in Internet Explorer would open with the application hosted inside of IE, like this: Note – for the purposes of discussion in this blog, I am using Excel in my examples...

Today we have a guest post from Dan Parish, who is a program manager on the Excel Services team. Dan is going to explain a bit more on how to use Excel Services to set up dashboards that are driven by parameters. Back in the original posts regarding Excel Services , Dave mentioned that Excel Services is targeted at consumers and explorers of workbooks. As such, Excel Services doesn't allow you to simply type into any cell or create new workbooks on the fly. Dave also mentioned that we do understand...

The folks on the Word team have asked me to let you all know they have set up a new team blog which you can read here: http://blogs.msdn.com/microsoft_office_word/default.aspx . Check it out and follow along if you are interested.

Danny Khen is back (Danny wrote a number of posts on programmability topics over the past year) with a white paper on developing UDFs for Excel client and server. In a few past posts, we discussed investments in user-defined functions (UDFs) in Excel 2007 , and we showed ( here , here and here ) how UDFs can be used in an Excel solution that runs on both Excel 2007 and the new Excel Services. I now gathered all this information and elaborated some more, resulting in an article and an extensive set...

The team that builds the drawing tools in Office (sometimes referred to as OfficeArt) is interested in understanding all the different ways people are using the OfficeArt drawing tools, images, and audio/video with Excel. While a lot of the usage is well-understood (on charts as callouts, as controls on the grid, as backgrouds in an application, as navigational items, etc.), we run into people doing all sorts of interesting things, so we thought it would be interesting to hear from blog readers on...

Folks that have been using data bars ( see here for more information) in Excel 2007 sometimes bump into a situation where the size of the bar painted by Excel on the smallest value in the dataset seems too big. An example will probably help. Take a look at this fake data and accompanying data bars: The size of the data bar for the last value – 170 – is too big given the relative size of 170 to the other numbers in the range (hundreds of thousands). Why would that be – the data bar should technically...

Back in January I talked about updates we have made to XLLs . We will soon be publishing an extensive article on MSDN which will cover Excel 2007 features that affect XLL add-ins and enable new XLL functionality, as well as changes to the XLL C API itself. The article was written by Steve Dalton (author of Excel Add-in Development in C/C++: Applications in Finance ). Today I’d like to give you a preview of this very useful document - you can find the document on MSDN here . Also, if you want to experiment...