Today's author, Helen Hosein, a Program Manager on the Excel team. Certain shadows created in Excel 2003 look different Excel 2007. In particular, you might notice that your old cell shadows, as well as shadows on things like Chart Titles might look a bit different when you open your workbooks in Excel 2007. This is because Excel treats these as shapes with no fill - a bit like a wire frame. The shadow that it casts is the rectangle of its outline. Only when the frame is filled in, does it cast a...

Today's author, Pej Javaheri, a Product Manager on the Excel Services team, talks about one of the more common configuration questions we hear about from customers. One of the challenges in sharing Excel workbooks is ensuring that the right people see the right data. With Excel Services, this has become a lot easier ensuring user's only see the information they are authorized to view and not sharing information that is privileged or out of their scope. With a few simple configuration steps, workbook...

The BI Blog does a quick recap of the SharePoint 2008 Conference that just passed with particular emphasis on the popularity of the Excel Services session: Dan Parish, from the Microsoft Excel Services team, presented how you can extend the capabilities of Excel Services to a packed room of over 300 with tremendous feedback. Not to worry if you missed that sessions as we will be posting the content that was presented in a separate blog to showcase examples of how you can use Excel Services.

Many of you who have been using Excel for a long time have most likely seen some of the creative, interesting, and rather unusual uses of Excel that people have conjured up. I'm talking about things like writing the Pac-Man game completely in Excel , stuff you wouldn't expect to see in a critical business application like Excel, but thanks to the ingenuity of spreadsheet hackers we get to see how the power and flexibility of spreadsheets can be put to use. I was reminded of this today when a colleague...

Today's author, Sanjay Kulkarni, a Program Manager on the Excel Services team. We have heard from several customers about scenarios where they have workbook dependencies. So the output of one workbook is used in other workbooks for calculations. The dependencies could be a result of the business model meaning different people in the organization being responsible for the workbooks or it could simply be a way of isolating related logic in different workbooks. In this blog post we will look at a sample...

Recently I posted an article discussing how PivotTables can be used on Excel Services to mimick the Data Validation feature . The author, Dany Hoter, sent me a copy of the file he used in the example screen shots and I never got around to posting it for our readers. Here's a short description of the example file from Dany: The example implements a scenario of calculating the pricing for car insurance based on the details entered in a form. The form can be collected on paper and entered manually into...