The Excel Team Blog

Video Tip: Conditional Formatting and Data Validation

2008-09-05T20:47:00Z

Today's author: Sam Radakovitz, a Program Manager on the Excel team that enjoys creating VBA applications in Excel. A bit ago, Joseph had a blog post about community clips on OfficeLabs.com , so for this post, I wanted to take advantage of the video demonstration and do the post via community clips. The topic is an Excel tip about using conditional formatting and data validation to turn on and off the formatting on the sheet without needing VBA code. The video can be found here and is also embedded...(read more)

Using Excel & Excel Services with SQL Server Analysis Services 2008

2008-08-28T19:49:00Z

Today's author, Pej Javaheri, a Product Manager on the SharePoint team, talks about configuring Excel Services to work with the just-released SQL Server 2008. With the recent announcement of SharePoint Server 2007 supporting SQL Server 2008 , like you, I was excited to setup my Excel / Excel Services environment to take advantage of the great new capabilities available, and there are many. I encourage you to take a look at how the new SQL environment will benefit your SharePoint deployment, and...(read more)

Using Excel 2007 for Progress Tracking in the Classroom

2008-08-21T18:39:00Z

Today's author, Danny Khen, a Program Manager on the Excel team, discusses a solution he recently built using Excel. The Manual Spreadsheet Spreadsheets are the bread and butter of running the business world, where PCs are ubiquitous. The possibility, indeed even the need, to use spreadsheets in an environment where access to a computer is not taken for granted seems absurd to us, as business users and technology professionals. We do still print reports for some output scenarios, such as executive...(read more)

Reading Excel Files from Linux

2008-08-15T05:40:00Z

Today's author, Chris Rae, a Program Manager on the Excel team, talks about using Perl code to read Excel's new file format. The OOXML Format As most readers will know, we spent a lot of time during the development of Office 2007 in creating and documenting a new XML-based file format (Office Open XML) to replace the much more complex binary formats the various Office applications have used for the last twenty years. A lot of time. Many of us dream in XML now. OOXML encompasses an XML file...(read more)

How to Create a Perpetual Yearly Calendar in Excel

2008-08-08T06:21:00Z

Today's author: Mark Gillis is an Excel writer. He was born October 3, 1952. Does his birthday fall on the same weekday as your birthday? Do you have nagging, unanswered questions floating around in the back of your mind like: "What day of the week does the date, January 23, 4589 fall on?", "What's the date of the eighth Thursday of 1922?", and "Is 9000 a leap year?". If you're like me, the answer is clearly no. Nevertheless, there's a remote chance that...(read more)

Building an Asset Tracking Application in Excel Services – Part 5 of 5

2008-08-01T20:29:00Z

Today's author, Dan Parish, concludes his discussion of building an Excel Services solution. In Part 4 , I walked through creating the web part pages for the solution. At this point, you should have a fully functional asset tracking application up and running. The last piece, that we'll build today, is a simple web part that will allow your admin to archive all of the information they have collected. Overview At this point we now have the entire application up and running. We can collect...(read more)

Building an Asset Tracking Application in Excel Services – Part 4 of 5

2008-07-24T21:33:00Z

Today's author, Dan Parish, continues on his discussion of building an Excel Services solution. In Part 3b I walked through creating a User Defined Function (UDF) that pulls information from a SharePoint List into Excel Services. In today's post, I will describe how to create the two web part pages that make up the actual application: the page that end user's see, and the page that the admin uses. Overview Now that we have our spreadsheet running on the server and displaying data entered...(read more)

Building an Asset Tracking Application in Excel Services – Part 3b of 5

2008-07-01T05:34:00Z

Today's author, Dan Parish, continues his discussion on building an Excel Services solution. In Part 3a I walked through how to create the SharePoint List that stores the data users enter. In this post, I will walk through how to create the Excel Services User Defined Function (UDF) that will pull this information from the SharePoint List into Excel Services. Overview Out of the box, Excel Services does not support pulling in data stored in SharePoint Lists. However, you can add this functionality...(read more)

Community Clips

2008-06-25T17:23:00Z

The folks over in Office Labs are testing out a new idea called Community Clips and I, personally, think it's a fantastic idea. It's a community site where anyone, not just Microsoft employees, can upload "how to" videos that take you step-by-step through accomplishing a particular task. Think of it as YouTube meets Office Online . If, like me, you're a visual learner, this is a great way to learn new tips and tricks on how to do any number of things with Microsoft products...(read more)

Building an Asset Tracking Application in Excel Services – Part 3a of 5

2008-06-17T16:52:00Z

Today's author, Dan Parish, continues his discussion on building an Excel Services solution. Part 3 turned out to be a bit longer than we had anticipated so we've split it up into two parts: 3a and 3b. Thus far in this series, I have given an overview of the solution , and detailed how to build the Excel workbook that is the core of how it works. In today's post, I will walk through building the SharePoint List that users will input their machine information into. Overview In order to...(read more)

Building an Asset Tracking Application in Excel Services – Part 2 of 5

2008-06-03T18:45:00Z

Today's author, Dan Parish, a Program Manager on the Excel Services team, continues on with his multi-part post about building an application using Excel Services. In my last post I gave an overview of the asset tracking application that I am going to spend the next four posts describing how to build. The core of the application is the workbook it is based on. The workbook is what really makes this application work, since it is what pulls in the data users entered, figures out who has and hasn't...(read more)

VBA Focus Group at TechEd

2008-06-02T17:02:00Z

Do you use VBA (or any other extensibility mechanism) in Office and are you headed to TechEd? If so the we would like to talk with you in an "invitation only" meeting. This is your chance to share your feedback and influence the work that Microsoft is doing in the programmability space. You must be available for either: TechEd Dev: Held at 4:30 on Thursday, June 5th TechEd ITPro: Held at 3:00pm on Monday, June 9th If interested, please respond to the following questions to Amanda.Silver...(read more)

Building an Asset Tracking Application in Excel Services – Part 1 of 5

2008-05-28T05:55:00Z

Today's author, Dan Parish, a Program Manager on the Excel Services team, will discuss over the next few posts how he built an asset tracking application using Excel Services. At the SharePoint Conference in Seattle in March, I did a presentation entitled "Leveraging Excel Services to Build Rich SharePoint Applications". The talk included a demonstration of how to build a SharePoint application that used Excel Services to solve a data collection scenario in which group administrators...(read more)

Ten Tips for Using Excel Services

2008-05-23T20:58:00Z

A new MSDN article about Excel Services was just released. If you do any kind of work with Excel Services, whether you are just getting started with it or trying to do something a bit more advanced, this article is a pretty good read because it covers some of the more common pitfalls that we hear from customers. The following topics are discussed: Making an Excel Workbook Compatible with Excel Services Configuring External Data Connections Configuring Excel Services to Work with Kerberos Saving an...(read more)

New Technical Article on Excel Services

2008-05-22T00:34:00Z

There's a new article up on MSDN that describes a custom solution built by the IT department here at Microsoft that uses Excel Services. Rather than re-paraphrase, I'll "borrow" liberally from Shahar's description : The solution is probably one of the most advanced implementation of Excel Services I have seen to date and includes lots of ingenious customizations - the white paper, specifically, talks about how to use Excel Services as a landing pad for data and then get the...(read more)