Today’s Author: Joe Chirilov , a program manager on the who has done a lot of work on both the Excel and Excel Services teams. Joe is going to discuss a spreadsheet he recently built using Excel 2007. Recently a large group of friends and I went on a multi-city tour of Europe that lasted a couple weeks. We had a blast, but that’s a conversation for another day. There was a lot of planning that went into this trip and responsibilities for booking different legs of the trip were spread out across the...

Today’s Author: Eric Patterson, a program manager on the Excel team. Eric is going to discuss applying pattern fills to chart data points and includes a sample add-in for this purpose. Overview In Excel 2007, the interface for applying Pattern fills to chart elements has been removed in favor of the interface for applying Picture and Texture fills. Charts formatted with pattern fills in previous versions of Excel will retain and display the pattern fills when opened in Excel 2007. Here is an example...

Today’s author: Chad Rothschiller, a program manager on the Excel team. Chad is going to discuss using formulas to 'clean up' data in Excel. Overview Excel is a great tool to use when you need to take data in one format, manipulate it into another format, and push the results along to another process, e.g. a database. In this context, Excel is a great landing pad or middle man, serving as a data transformation tool to move data from one system to another. This example considers a sample data set...

Today’s author: Chris Rae, a program manager on the Excel team. Chris is going to discuss iteration in Excel. Iteration is a powerful feature in Excel, but not one that is familiar to a large number of users. I’m going to use iteration in Excel to create something which will be familiar to many people – Conway’s Game of Life. Iteration Much the same as iteration in any programming language, there’s a small leap to be made to understand the basic principle of interation in a spreadsheet. An iterative...