Today’s author, Monica Poinescu, a Software Developer in Test on the Excel team, discusses two different approaches to analyzing data in Excel. Edit: I've attached a file at the bottom of this blog that contains spreadsheets of the examples discussed in this post. My earlier blog on the new Excel 2007 function SUMIFS spawned a very interesting discussion (thanks to everyone who posted comments there): when trying to analyze/aggregate data in a table, how do we decide whether to use functions versus...

Today’s author, Chad Rothschiller, a Program Manager on the Excel team, is back with a follow up from his previous post on VBA and Excel performance . I want to start off this post by thanking everyone who sent in their examples in response to my January request. It is incredibly helpful to be able to look at what you all are doing with Excel! Not only did I see a huge variety in how Excel is being used, you also pointed out various tips and tricks for writing fast VBA code in Excel. In this post...

Today’s author, Dany Hoter, a Product Planner for the Excel team, shares a neat trick he learned recently for creating dynamic data validation ranges. The sample file used for this blog post can be found in the attachments at the bottom of this post. The problem: Validating data entry based on hierarchical (parent child) data. The example used is regions and countries but it could be countries and cities, product categories and sub-categories, class and student name, etc. You want to enter a region...