This article continues the series on PowerPivot that started with an overview as well as an introduction to PowerPivot for Excel 2010. We’ll now focus on the support PowerPivot provides for collaboration. Frequently, business users need to share applications they create on their desktops with a workgroup. As it turns out, SharePoint provides a great platform that is critical for realizing the overarching goal of extending business intelligence technology to an organization: Great feature set for...

In this blog article, we’ll step through using PowerPivot for Excel 2010 for building a rich application in Excel. Note: following screenshots describe the SQL Server 2008 R2 August Community Technology Preview (CTP) functionality for a feature codenamed Gemini. As recently announced , Gemini will be released under the PowerPivot brand. After installation, Gemini appears on the Excel 2010 ribbon: Importing Data Selecting the ‘Load & Prepare Data’ button launches the PowerPivot client window:...

More info and a fun video here: http://powerpivot.com/

Today we have a guest author from the SQL Server Analysis Services team, Ashvini Sharma, to tell us about the PowerPivot (née Gemini) feature that you may have heard about recently. PowerPivot is the recently announced name of technologies this blog previously referred to by its codename, Gemini. This article describes why there is a need for such a tool, and briefly what PowerPivot provides. More information is available on the PowerPivot blog . The Need for PowerPivot PivotTables continue to be...

Today at the SharePoint conference the Office Developer Marketing Team announced the Office 2010 Application Compatibility Program . Details were posted today at Gray Knowlton's blog . Here's an excerpt from his post: With the great value Office 2010 brings for end users, IT Professionals and Developers, we are also investing heavily in making deployment of the new version of Office easier. As part of our focus on deployment, we have renewed priority on helping ensure applications and Add-ins for...

I know many Excel users also tend to be Access users, so I thought it would be a good idea to share this bit of news. The Access folks recently recorded a great video showcasing the major work that has gone into Access 2010. In short: Access solutions, built in Access and published to the web where users interact with forms and reports via the browser. Pretty exciting stuff. Check it out here: http://blogs.msdn.com/access/archive/2009/10/19/access-web-databases-and-the-access-show.aspx

Steve Tullis & Pej Javaheri presented “Intro to Excel and Excel Services 2010” to a standing room only crowd at SharePoint Conference 2010. Features demo’d include: Excel: Pivot Chart improvements Filter Search Named sets Improvements to conditional formatting Slicers Sparklines Excel Services: Client fidelity improvements & support of new Excel 2010 features (View) Support of workbooks containing images, VBA, etc. Edit & Collaboration in the Enterprise (SharePoint) and in the Cloud ...

From the Office Web Apps Blog : About a month ago I wrote about the Technical Preview on Windows Live. Since then we’ve seen a lot of interest in Office Web Apps and received numerous requests from people wanting to try them out. To make this possible, we are opening up the Technical Preview and inviting more people to try out the Office Web Apps. For a limited time, you can sign-up for a Technical Preview account here (if you are already a part of the technical preview, this link will generate...

The SharePoint blog has a pretty extensive write up detailing the innovations in SharePoint 2010 . Here are some Excel relevant excerpts: On Business Intelligence: Historically, business intelligence has been a specialized toolset used by a small set of users with little ad-hoc interactivity. Our approach is to unlock data and enable collaboration on the analysis to help everyone in the organization get richer insights. Excel Services is one of the popular features of SharePoint 2007 as people like...

More dispatches from Charlie Ellis at SPC. Note, he mentions some new features we haven't yet talked about on the blog (spoilers!) but will soon! Three things really struck me during the keynote address: There’s just incredible momentum around SharePoint and a ton of excitement around SharePoint 2010 and all the great new social networking functionality, integration with the Office clients, the Web Apps, and – of course – the Business Intelligence in SharePoint. The atmosphere of the conference is...