Today’s author: Eran Megiddo, the program manager who led the Excel Services 2007 effort. Eran is going to briefly talk about a few books that the Excel Services team wrote about the product. I wanted to let folks know about two new Excel Services books which can help you get familiar with this new technology, deploy Excel Services, and develop applications that work against it. Both were written by members of the Excel Services team. The first book is “ Beginning Excel Services ”. The first part...

Today’s author: Katherine Fifer , an intern on the Excel team. Katherine is just wrapping up a summer of fantastic work, and today she is going to discuss how to create a combo chart in Excel 2007. Often it is useful to create charts which compare different types of data. For example, you might want to compare share price with trading volume, or revenue with number of units sold, or poverty rate with unemployment and consumer confidence, or any number of other things. To quickly and clearly display...

Some readers have expressed interest in working with and better understanding SpreadsheetML, part of the Open XML Formats recently standardized by Ecma International (I received a string of about a dozen emails in the last week or two asking how to do this or that with SpreadsheetML). I wanted to highlight a good resource that covers that specific ground: www.openxmldeveloper.org . The site has news content related to the Open XML Formats, a library of ‘how-to’ articles written up, and a forums section...

Today’s author: Christian Stich, a program manager on the Excel Services team who likes to combine his finance and engineering backgrounds. Christian is going to talk about building a multithreaded UDF for Monte Carlo simulations and using it for options pricing. The example code and workbook in this post demonstrate the implementation of a European Put/Call Option valuation model using a high performance Monte Carlo simulation. Readers with a finance background realize that European options can...

Today’s author: Sam Radakovitz, a program manager on the Excel team that enjoys creating VBA applications in Excel. When I went to create my first Excel 2007 Ribbon application, I found it a bit difficult to get the right RibbonX and VBA functions setup correctly. I wasn’t quite sure on the RibbonX attributes … and I wasn’t sure on the arguments to the VBA functions or when the ribbon would call them. I kept thinking if I would have had a sample Excel workbook to reference I’d probably pick things...

Today’s author: Sam Radakovitz, a program manager on the Excel team that enjoys creating VBA applications in Excel. Back in early 2005, Excel 2007 was under development, the Backstreet Boys released a new album, and I took a weekend out to create a date picker add-in for Excel. The add-in was fun to write, not super duper fancy code, but it got the job done and helped me learn about the various Excel events and Excel’s add-in model. I pushed it up on the web, got some feedback and made a couple of...

Over the past few months, there has not been a lot of activity on this blog. Today, we have made a slight change to the blog (specifically, turning it into the Official Excel/Excel Services blog). That means a couple of things. First, that activity is going to pick up again - we plan on having 1-2 posts per week. Second, the posts are going to come from all over the Excel team. The content will remain the same - Excel 2007 and Excel Services - and team members will be writing posts about how they...