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September 2009 - The Excel Team Blog

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  • Dressing up your Slicers

    In the last part of this 3 part series on slicers I’ll show you how slicers can be customized many different ways to create stellar looking reports. Previously in this series: Part 1 : Easy (and Even Fun!) Data Exploration: Introducing Excel 2010 Slicers Part 2 : Interacting with Slicers Slicers use styles the same way tables and PivotTables do, in light and dark options: The default light style is shown below on the left. In order to use custom font, colors, and borders I can either start from scratch...
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  • Interacting with Slicers

    In part 2 of this 3 part series introducing slicers, I’ll show you some of the ways you can interact with slicers. Part 1 can be found here . Slicers reveal where the data is Let’s say I want to slice on my customer data for yesterday, and I only want to see a list of customers with Partial College and Bachelors education levels. As I click on these two tiles to select them, they turn blue. As it turns out, yesterday all my customers were either Partial College or Partial High School. I had no customers...
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  • Using form controls on a worksheet

    Today’s author is Rob van Gelder, previously quite active in the online Excel scene (Newsgroups, Excel forums, his own but currently inactive website) and who just upgraded to Excel 2007 because he still likes to dabble. The following power tip shows that he’s still having fun with form controls. My goal is to use form controls on my sheet. · One up/down button to change the Edit Year · One slider to change the Quantity · One slider to change the Price I don't need a slider for Total Value, because...
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  • Adding Every Other Cell in a Column

    Today’s author is Bill Jelen, author of 24 books on Microsoft Office Excel. He is a regular guest on TechTV with Leo Laporte and the host of MrExcel.com , which includes more than 300,000 questions and answers about Excel. Jenny asks "Is there a quick way of adding every other cell ?, I have a column of about 250 cells, and I have to select them manually using Ctrl. Can you help ?" Jenny, this is a matter of using a little math to remember how to determine if a number is even or is odd...
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  • Easy (and Even Fun!) Data Exploration: Introducing Excel 2010 Slicers

    Thanks to Karen Cheng for putting together this series on Slicers. New to Excel 2010 are slicers, which are visual controls that allow you to quickly and easily filter your data in an interactive way. They float above the grid, like charts and shapes. Here’s an example of the same slicer in three different states. You can select one, all, or some countries. A slicer acts like a report filter, so you can hook it up to a PivotTable, PivotChart, or CUBE function to create an interactive report. Shows...
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  • New and Improved Solver

    Thanks to Eric Patterson for putting together this post. In Excel 2010, we have made a number of improvements to Solver that make it easy for beginners to get started and more advanced ones to find solutions to all types of problems. The purpose of this post is to review the improvements to Solver, and so assumes some familiarity with the tool. If you are not familiar with Solver, you can learn more about Solver from Office Online . The help topic applies to the Solver that ships in Excel 2007 and...
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  • Excel Web App Coming to Windows Live

    A while back I blogged about the announcement at PDC of the Excel Web App. Today I am excited to share with you that we are making the Excel Web App, as well as the Word and PowerPoint Web Apps, available to a select group of Windows Live users. To quote the Office Web Apps blog : This early peek at the Office Web Apps will include high-fidelity viewing of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files in the browser. Invitees will also be able to edit Excel and PowerPoint files. Over time we’ll add OneNote Web...
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  • Calculate the ISO Start of Year date

    Today’s author is Shane Devenshire, who has been an Excel MVP for many years and who regularly contributes to Excel Newsgroups. He has published over 300 articles in different computer magazines, and co-authored numerous books. Excel might be better today because of the many bugs he posted when he was a Beta tester! This post shows you how to use a formula or custom VBA function to calculate the ISO Start of Year date. Here is a formula for calculating the ISO Start of Year date for any legal Excel...

  • New Functions Bring New UI

    In the past two posts I talked about all of the improvements we have made to the function library in terms of accuracy and consistency. In this post I will describe the UI changes we have made to help users take advantage of these improvements in Excel 2010. In addition I will also talk about the backward compatibility experience for the new function library. Function Improvements UI Changes As a result of the changes we’ve made to improve the consistency of Excel’s function library, we have introduced...

  • Function Consistency Improvements in Excel 2010

    The second part of the function improvements work we are making for Excel 2010 is to create a more consistent function library. We have implemented a new naming scheme to allow consistent and accurate naming convention for functions. Also, we have added new functions to the function library to round out our function set. New functions will take advantage of the new and more accurate algorithms. Consistent Function Names To be explicitly clear about what our functions do, we have implemented a new...

  • Function Improvements in Excel 2010

    Thanks to Jessica Liu for putting together the next few posts on function improvements. In Excel 2010, we made many improvements to Excel's function library. Excel 2010 will feature an accurate and consistent function library while remaining compatible with previous versions of Excel. In this first blog post, I will be giving an overview of the work we did in this area as well as talk about the function accuracy improvements. Subsequent posts will go into the details of the consistency improvements...

  • More on Performance Improvements in Excel 2010

    In this second post about our investments in Excel 2010 performance I’m going to wrap up talking about the challenges and opportunities we embraced for this release, specifically on the topics of large data set scenarios, calculation performance and investment in new multi-core features. Large Data Set Performance With the introduction of a bigger grid in Excel 2007 and knowing that 64-bit Excel (see this post ) would enable our customers to really start taking advantage of all those cells, we took...

  • Performance Improvements in Excel 2010

    Thanks to Chad Rothschiller for putting together these posts on performance. In this release of Excel we spent dedicated research and development resources on improving performance. In addition to the usual optimizations and tuning efforts we make post “code complete”, we spent time during the development milestones researching, designing, and implementing performance features beyond algorithmic tuning. For this release, these are the areas where we focused our performance improvement efforts: Customer...
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