Today's author, Ben Rampson, a Program Manager on the Excel team. Customers who author charts in presentations and reports often spend a significant amount of effort modifying their charts to get them looking just the way they want. While the new Chart Style and Chart Layout features in Office 2007 provide some great one-click options to quickly alter the appearance of a chart, there are still times when one needs to modify a chart even further. A company policy may require that a chart use particular...

Today's author: Dany Hoter, a product planner who works on the Excel Services team. Excel has a feature called Data Validation that controls the possible values a user might enter into a cell or a range of cells. As you can see there are many options for validating data entry. The most popular is probably validating against a list of values. The list can be included in the validation definition or can be a region in the sheet referenced from the dialog. Recently I saw an example created by a customer...

If you are passionate about business intelligence (BI), you may be interested to know that a new Microsoft blog has started that is all about BI. It is aptly named The BI Blog . One interesting recent post talks about how Microsoft was recently placed in the Leaders Quadrant for BI platforms in Gartner's Business Intelligence Magic Quadrant.

Today's author: Allan Folting, a program manager who works on the Excel team. I have gotten lots of questions from customers around specific functionality in Microsoft Excel 2007 PivotTables that is missing when connected to Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services Service Pack 2 cubes: Filtering individual calculated members Showing non-visual totals when filtering I have also gotten lots of requests for the ability to add calculations to OLAP PivotTables using the object model, specifically...

Gabhan Berry, a Program Manager on the Excel team, has just started up a new blog devoted to Excel programming . To quote his first blog post : Starting from today, I'll be blogging about all things related to programming with Excel. From addins to automation; VBA to .NET. Oh, I'll also be posting about XLLs and coding in C/C++. Excel programmability is a huge and very popular subject with our customers and my aim with this blog is to make it a little bit easier by sharing what I know to whomever...