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...

A few months ago, I described the new features we have added to Excel 2007 in the area of conditional formatting. One of the new formats we added is called a “icon set” … check out this earlier post for a refresher, but the basic idea is that Excel draws an icon in each cell representing the value of that cell relative to the other cells in the selected range. Here is a shot from that post. (Click to enlarge) The Excel 2007 UI allows you to choose from a wide range of icon sets to apply to your document...

In the previous post I showed how an existing set of UDFs, defined in an Excel addin, can be used with Excel Services by wrapping them with a managed UDF assembly. Some companies develop calculation libraries in a modular way. They want to use their library functions for various purposes on various platforms, and Excel UDFs is just one of those purposes. So they develop a function library, say in C or C++, which is independent of any of those platforms, and does not assume any application-specific...

Here is the second post from Danny Khen, a program manager on the Excel Services team. In the previous post I explained about the investments we made around UDFs in Excel 2007 and in the Excel Services. I also showed how Excel Services use a different UDF technology than those used by the Excel client – managed UDFs. “Whoa”, you may be asking – “so what about all my investment in Excel UDFs – can’t I take them to the server as well?” Well, you actually can, with some limitations. And we believe that...

For the next few posts, we have a “guest post” from Danny Khen, a program manager on the Excel Services team. Danny is going to talk about UDFs in Excel and Excel Services. Enjoy. UDFs are user-defined worksheet functions – custom functions that you create to supplement Excel’s set of intrinsic worksheet functions. UDFs are used to create calculation libraries, or to import data into Excel sheets in custom ways. In Excel 2007, we’ve made a number of key investments around UDFs. They revolve around...

I am spending some of this week at the Crystal Ball ® User Conference , where I had the good fortune to be able to present an overview of Excel 2007 to the conference attendees. I want to thank the folks as Decisioneering for the opportunity, and I would also like to thank all of the folks that I have met at the conference who took the time to provide feedback about Excel and requests for new functionality. It is always very helpful to be able to have candid discussions about what people do with...

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...