Today's author: Mark Gillis, an Excel and SharePoint writer, who's been through six versions of Office, survived to tell the tale, and picked up a thing or two along the way. Excel doesn't have an easy way to append multiple text files into one worksheet through the user interface. From time to time I hear customers asking how to do this in an easy way. Do you have to use Access or VB code to solve this problem? No. There's a way to do it in Excel by using a simple SQL statement in the connection...

Today's author: Sam Radakovitz, a Program Manager on the Excel team that enjoys creating VBA applications in Excel. A bit ago I got a question through email asking if we could change the 'grid selection color' in Excel. Or at least I called it 'grid selection color', it's basically what the cells look like when you select a block or multiple blocks of them: As you can see, the color is a bit light and hard for some folks to see, especially on a laptop if you're looking at it from the wrong angle...

Last post we talked about how to use Excel as a flexible development environment and touched on how to use ActiveX Controls to enhance your solution and using tables programmatically to manipulate data. In this post we are going to drill into how to add custom Ribbon UI, context menus. Custom Context Menu In order to make playlist creation a lot easier in the Excel Media Player, I added the following custom right click context options to my Tables. To see how to do this open the MediaPlayer.xlsm...

Last post we talked about how to use Excel as a flexible development environment and touched on the benefits of using Office graphics to build your UI. This post goes into how to use ActiveX controls in Excel and how to contain and manipulate data in tables to drive your application. Using ActiveX Controls First we need to enable that hidden Developer Tab, Click Office Button, Excel Options and Toggle 'Show Developer tab in the Ribbon' on. Now click Developer Tab, Insert, on the bottom right corner...

Today's author, Jon Adams, a Tester on the Excel team. A copy of the spreadsheet discussed in this post can be found as an attachment at the bottom of this post. As you are probably well aware, Excel is a very versatile tool and is often used in ways that are hard to imagine. This blog post is a follow up of Joe's post "Unusual (but cool!) Uses of Excel" . I am going to show you how to use Excel for rapid application development using the new Office Art graphics Engine, ActiveX, Table Objects, VBA...

We sometimes get mails from our customers claiming to have found a calculation error in Excel, when in fact the calculation isn't wrong, but the side effects of binary floating point precision make it seem that way. Today's author: Jessica Liu, a Program Manager on the Excel team, discusses the way Excel performs calculations, explains why sometimes you see answers you may not expect, and provides some tips on how to avoid rounding issues. Take a look at the following table: I want to be able to...

Today's author, Gabhan Berry, a Program Manager on the Excel team. A copy of the spreadsheet discussed in this post can be found as an attachment at the bottom of this post. Introduction When faced with a table of data, what kind of techniques do we employ to extract information from it? Maybe the first thing we do is create summaries. We might total up the columns or we might chart the data. Perhaps, we might even create a PivotTable and drill down into subtotals. All in all, summarizing data is...

As everyone who has followed this blog already knows, we introduced a new file format with Office 2007 (and Excel 2007) with the extension .xlsx called Office Open XML (OOXML). Microsoft submitted the new file format to Ecma International, and in December 2006, that file format was approved as ECMA-376 , and Ecma submitted the standard to ISO/IEC JTC 1 for fast-track processing to become an ISO standard. Over the last 15 months, many conversations have taken place between Ecma and the National Bodies...