Today's author: Danny Khen, a program manager who works on both the Excel and Excel Services teams. What is this about? Office 2007 introduced new default file formats – Open XML. Excel, Word and PowerPoint take advantage of them. One of the nicest things about those file formats is that they enable easy manipulation of Office documents without needing the Office applications up and running – by simply modifying XML “parts” within the files. In June 2007 we published an SDK that facilitates this...

Today’s Author: Scott Ruble, a lead program manager on the Excel team who focuses on the area of data visualization. Scott is going to discuss how to create an intraday time series chart. Periodically, users need to create a chart where the data occurs within a single day such as by the minute or hour. This is actually fairly easy to do but unfortunately isn’t very obvious. A typical scenario is you own a restaurant that takes phone orders and you want to reduce the wait time for customers placing...

Today’s Author: Howie Dickerman, a program manager on the Excel team. Howie is going to discuss different ways to change data sources in Excel 2007. Prerequisite: This post assumes that you have read the blog post entitled “Managing External Database Connections in Excel 12” which can be found here . Folks who connect to external data from Excel will sometimes encounter the following user scenarios: Switch between test and production data sources I want to test my spreadsheet while connecting to...

The 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 1 is now available for download . To quote from the download site, "The 2007 Microsoft Office suite Service Pack 1 delivers important customer-requested stability and performance improvements, while incorporating further enhancements to user security. This service pack also includes all of the updates released for the 2007 Office suite prior to December of 2007. You can get a more complete description of SP1, including a list of issues that were fixed...