Is Excel an important tool you can't live without? Would you like to meet with others to learn more about how to optimize your usage of Excel? Do you like London in the spring time? If you answered Yes to any of these questions, you might be interested in the upcoming UK Excel User Conference. It takes places on April 1st and 2nd, 2009. There will be great speakers from the Excel community, and the topics look to be very informative. And, it's free! To learn more, check out the full details here...

Today's author, Steve Tullis, a Program Manager on the Excel Services team, talks about the various load balancing schemes available for Excel Services. I have received a number of questions in the past few weeks about the load balancer administration options available for the Excel Services custom load balancer. Here’s the scoop: the settings account for the “OpenWorkbook” method when first accessing Excel Services. Once you have an active session with a workbook, additional requests from that user...

Today's author, Diego Oppenheimer, a Program Manager on the Excel team, delves into some of the more advanced functionality of Excel to solve a challenging problem. The file used in this blog post can be found in the attachments at the bottom of this post. Throughout this next blog post I will be using a tool that comes with Excel called Solver. For more information on solver please visit the Office Online site ( http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/HP051983681033.aspx?pid=CH010004571033 ). Background...