The Excel Team Blog

Hover Charts

2010-03-11T21:00:00Z

Thanks to Dan Battagin for writing this blog post. OK, so I'm sure everyone knows about the Freeze Panes feature in Excel - it's been around forever, and it's pretty useful in certain circumstances where you want to keep a row (or more) of data at the top of the sheet, or column on the side of the sheet - especially for filtering. Of course, we've made it a little less necessary in the 2007 and 2010 releases, since table headers (2007) and now table filters (2010) automatically camp...(read more)

PowerPivot Alpha Geek Challenge

2010-03-03T21:30:00Z

There was a recent contest with PowerPivot, see the details of the contest here: http://wildfireapp.com/website/6/contests/19877?order=recency&view_entries=1 There were some great PowerPivot reports submitted, including some from our MVPs: Bill Jelen created a “Tag Cloud & SmartArt Updated Via PowerPivot!” report: Tushar Mehta created a “Visualize US population trends over the last 150 years” report: Check out all of the entries here: http://wildfireapp.com/website/6/contests...(read more)

Scatter charts with PowerPivot

2010-02-24T21:30:00Z

Rob over at http://powerpivotpro.com has a interesting post on scatter charts and PowerPivot: At right is a list of all chart types in Excel. But not all of them are supported as PivotCharts. Try to use XY (Scatter), Bubble, or Stock as a PivotChart, and you’ll get an alert saying you cannot create it with pivot data. So, do you give up? Nope. Remember the post where I converted a PivotTable to Cube Formulas using that button on the ribbon? This is a wonderful opportunity to use that feature in an...(read more)

Windows Touch & Excel 2010

2010-02-18T20:30:00Z

Thanks to Robin Wakefield for putting together this post on touch. With the new Windows 7 Touch platform you now have the ability to interact with applications by touching the screen. This paradigm is a huge success in the mobile market and as the hardware evolves, applications utilizing touch input will become more broadly available. We will likely begin to see touch as the primary interaction method for some PCs such as wall mounted displays used as a kiosk as well as to enhance the experience...(read more)

Migrating Excel 4 Macros to VBA

2010-02-17T00:00:00Z

Thanks to Eric Patterson for writing this blog post. As promised in our Programmability Improvements in Excel 2010 , here are more details about the Excel 2010 improvements to aid in migrating Excel 4 Macros to VBA. Excel has a macro facility, known as Excel 4 macros (XLM for short) that was the primary macro language prior to the introduction of VBA in Excel 5.0. Most people have long since migrated their Excel 4 macros to VBA; however, some Excel 4 macro capabilities were missing from VBA, which...(read more)

Where to Find the Form Controls

2010-02-13T00:50:20Z

Today’s author is Jan Karel Pieterse, an Excel MVP. In this article, he shows the different locations of the form controls in Excel. You can find additional details on how to use these controls on his web site: http://www.jkp-ads.com/articles/controls.asp . Excel 2007 and 2010 In Excel 2007 and 2010, the form controls and control toolbox controls are slightly hidden. First of all, you need to show the Developer tab in the ribbon. Here is how that's done: In Excel 2007, click the Microsoft Office...(read more)

Offloading UDF’s to a Windows HPC Cluster

2010-02-12T18:30:00Z

Thanks to Gabhan Berry for putting together this series on high performance computing. In my previous post I discussed how we have enabled workbooks to be calculated on a Windows HPC cluster. In this post, I’ll describe the other piece of HPC integration we have developed in Excel 2010: offloading the calculation of UDFs to a Windows HPC cluster. Overview User defined functions are one of the most popular pieces of Excel extensibility. UDFs enable customers to create their own worksheet functions...(read more)

Calculating Excel Models on an HPC Cluster

2010-02-09T06:04:00Z

Thanks to Gabhan Berry for putting together this series on high performance computing. In a previous post , I introduced the work we have done with the Windows HPC team to enable customers to calculate Excel models on a Windows HPC cluster. In this follow up post, I go a little deeper into how we can harness the utility and power of Excel 2010 and Windows HPC to solve complex modeling problems. Modeling Complex Systems using Excel 2010 and Windows HPC Mathematically modeling complex problems is far...(read more)

Excel 2010 and High Performance Computing

2010-02-04T17:36:00Z

Thanks to Gabhan Berry for putting together this series on high performance computing. In this post, I introduce the work we’ve done with the Windows HPC team to integrate Excel 2010 with cluster computing. This is a high level overview and I’ll follow up with the technical details in later posts. High Level Overview of Excel 2010 and Cluster Computing High Performance Computing (HPC) is a branch of technical computing that uses supercomputers and cluster computing to solve computationally intensive...(read more)

Management Features of PowerPivot for SharePoint

2010-02-01T22:24:00Z

Thanks to John Hancock from the PowerPivot team for putting together this post. Previous articles have covered some of the features of PowerPivot for Excel, and shown how PowerPivot helps users build really powerful BI applications right in Excel. We have described some of the PowerPivot for SharePoint features on this blog as well as the PowerPivot blog , so for this article I will be focusing on the features that we provide to help IT to manage and understand the self-service BI activity. Self...(read more)

Programmability Improvements in Excel 2010

2010-01-28T06:01:00Z

Thanks to Danny Khen for putting together this post. What’s new? Excel has been a platform for developing business solutions for a long time now. Developers write code to customize and extend Excel in many ways – automating Excel operations, user interface customizations, data entry forms and extending Excel formulas with user defined functions, to name some key ones. Many developers create very complex applications, which have demanding requirements and push Excel to its limits, so developers are...(read more)

Table Improvements in Excel 2010

2010-01-26T05:25:00Z

Thanks to Ben Rampson for putting together this post. In today’s article I will outline three features in Office 2010 that improve table interaction in Excel. These feature additions build on the work started Excel 2007, addressing areas with significant customer feedback and further improving the feature area. The first table improvement feature, AutoFilters in sheet headers, builds on work completed in the previous version of Excel. In Office 2007, when the table header of a selected table is scrolled...(read more)

Collaborative Editing Using Excel Web App

2010-01-21T18:59:00Z

In the last couple posts, we talked about how editing in Excel Web App works, how it’s different than editing in the Excel desktop client, and the kinds of things you can do in the Excel Web App. If you haven’t read about the editing experience yet, start with the Editing in Excel Web App – Part I post. Today I am going to cover how Excel Web App’s editing functionality enables easier collaboration on spreadsheets among multiple authors. Collaborative Editing – What’s That? Picture this scenario...(read more)

Editing in Excel Web App – Part II

2010-01-19T03:11:00Z

Today I’m going to continue on with our baseball stats tracking workbook example and talk more about the editing capabilities in Excel Web App. If you haven’t read Editing in Excel Web App – Part I though, I suggest you check it out first. Working with your data So now you’ve got a great looking workbook with lots of data and formulas. You send it out to your team and are sure that everyone will love it, and they do…sort of. Your team is picky. They want to “analyze” the data. The want to easily...(read more)

Editing in Excel Web App – Part I

2010-01-15T05:28:00Z

Thanks to Dan Parish for putting together this series on editing in Excel Web App. Before I get started, if you haven’t already read our Excel Web App 2010 Overview , you may want to take a minute to get acquainted with what Excel Web App is all about. In the next two posts I’m going to be talking about the editing capabilities of Excel Web App, and I’ll use the example of creating a simple baseball stats tracking workbook throughout so that you can see how all of these capabilities come together...(read more)