We now return to conditional formatting - what’s a colour scale?

It's been more than a decade and we're still waiting

Mats Hindhede — Sat, 29 Oct 2005 13:39:45 GMT

OK, great work on the formula bar. At last. Now I can see my cells. What a relief.

Now you only have three left of the four improvements that have been obvious since the early nineties to any Excel user with a 3-digit IQ.

2. Get 4 million rows and 1024 columns, so you beat this baby: http://www.jps-development.com

3. Make the data forms on the Data menu resizable. The fix size data forms look exactly the same in Excel 2003 as they did in Excel 4.0 back in 1992.

4. Enable multi-row worksheet tabs, so you can raise the 31-character worksheet name limit to 64 (at least) and let users view more tabs at once instead of using those pathetic VCR buttons.

Mats Hindhede

re: We now return to conditional formatting - what’s a colour scale?

Christopher C. — Fri, 14 Oct 2005 04:17:08 GMT

I'm sorry, but should I just cream my pants now or wait until later in private? You are my hero. Gradient color coding, PDF conversion, sexiness all around, my job is going to get significantly easier. I give you 15 hearts of pure joy.

re: We now return to conditional formatting - what’s a colour scale?

David Gainer — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 06:56:39 GMT

Harlan - Our work on find and replace this version was around making sure it works well for the bigger grid.

Curse my eyes!

the valrus — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 03:36:25 GMT

Damn, I wrote a cursory VB script to do this when I was an intern at GEICO in high school! I was sitting on a GOLD MINE!

re: We now return to conditional formatting - what’s a colour scale?

Harlan Grove — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 18:54:03 GMT

David Gainer...

...

|Harlan, . . . we have one unified charting

|engine across Excel, PPT, and Word, and

|PivotCharts are much more fully featured.

...

One charting engine is good.

Will there also be one find & replace engine, so Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and (dare I hope) Access would all be able to use the extended wildcards (will you finally call them regular expressions) Word has provided since, what, Office 97?

re: We now return to conditional formatting - what’s a colour scale?

David Gainer — Mon, 10 Oct 2005 05:26:04 GMT

Greetings folks. Everyone, thanks for the questions and comments. Appreciate your feedback and thoughts.

Graham, Simon, thanks. Simon, unfortunately, no changes have been made to our cell precedents features this time out.

Ian, being a product team guy that doesn’t run the beta program, the best I can do for now is give you all the information I can via this blog!

Graham, there has been an overhaul of the conditional formatting object model (to go with the new features), and I will try and sneak in a post about that this week if I can find the time. In general, where I talk about features, you can assume we have done the matching object model work. To answer your other question, no there has not been major change to VBE in this release. Our cross-Office programmability team has done some work for all the applications – for example, a nice programmable task pane – and I will make sure I have a topic on the work they have done at some point in the future.

Biff, I understand exactly what you mean, but no, we did not do any work in this area this release.

Vlado, let me double check before answering your question. I want to make sure I give you accurate information.

Andy, we tried to give users a lot of options in designing these new features, so you should be able to set things up exactly as you like.

Helen, thanks for the feedback. While we haven’t done exactly what you are suggesting, we have made it a bit easier to see the conditionally formatted range from the rules editing UI (more this week), and we have done some work around dynamic named ranges too to make them easier to use in formulas (more on that when I talk about Tables in a few weeks). Stay tuned!

Jon, yes, you can use a formula to control any of the new conditional formats.

Stephen, when I talk about the new UI this week, you will see we give you a couple of choices of colours by default, so feel free to give me more feedback later this week.

Harlan, we haven’t added new chart types this release, although we have done a huge amount of work in the area of charting. Specifically, charts now look superb & are much easier to create and edit, we have one unified charting engine across Excel, PPT, and Word, and PivotCharts are much more fully featured. Much more about charting to come …

re: We now return to conditional formatting - what’s a colour scale?

Harlan Grove — Sat, 08 Oct 2005 09:02:34 GMT

What, no variable rates for blinking text?

Seriously, visualization is nice. Will Excel provide box and whisker plots, 3D scatter plots (XYZ plots), contour plots, pairwise scatter plots? Will text values in chart series still be treated *always* as zeros?

re: We now return to conditional formatting - what’s a colour scale?

Tianwei — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 20:32:55 GMT

Stephen, I am sorry about your color perception. Yet I'd say it's a vast majority of the business community that use the green/yellow/red as a default notion.

re: We now return to conditional formatting - what’s a colour scale?

Stephen Bullen — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 16:30:14 GMT

Like a fairly large percentage of the world's male population, I'm mildly red/green colour-blind. In your second image, the cells that stand out depend on how lazy my eyes are, whether I look straight-on or obliquely, or how much I concentrate on it. To me, there doesn't seem to be much to distinguish the cells - it's just a big reddy-greeny mess. *Please* don't use this green/yellow/red as a default!

re: We now return to conditional formatting - what’s a colour scale?

Jon Peltier — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 15:54:56 GMT

Can we use a formula to control the gradient, as we can with the current conditional formatting (which now seems so inadequate)?