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Nick Hodge's Excel Blog

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  • Office 2007 SP2 Released

    Office SP2 has been released officially here . The list of changes against Excel seems fairly small but having been running the beta for some time it does seem quite a bit better, additionally there are improvements across the suite, probably most noticeably the speed in Outlook. Additionally support has been added for the Open Document Format (ODF) which is 'compatible' with stuff like Google Documents, although there are some areas where that just doesn't work, but expect that to get...

  • Excel User Conference Piccies

    Bob Phillips kindly took a few pictures of the recent conference which by his own admission he should have taken more of. It shows all the presenters, except, of course Bob and gives you a flavour that there where plenty of delegates and lots of 'action'. What was Simon Murphy doing? Although he is an 'all action' speaker. Thanks for taking those Bob and I agree, more next time. For those delegates wondering, the links to the slide decks and the files should be uploaded by tomorrow...
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  • Excel User Conference 2009

    Tomorrow sees the start of the two day event at Microsoft's cardinal Place site in London. We have some great speakers and topics lined up and the event has been oversubscribed since about a week after it was announced. That I think is a measure of what a great event it should be. Watch this space for updates afterwards and hopefully we will also get some files too.
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  • Today's Large Data Set

    Now, since Excel 2007 was announced to be having over 1 million rows, I made the statement, "Be careful what you wish for". Excel is not a database, there are programs far more suited to that task such as Access, SQL Server, SAP, Oracle, etc. Excel is a great reporting tool for those databases and can do fast and quite complex calculations much better than a database can. What I am conceding more and more now though, is that as my familiarity with Excel is far greater than with SQL Server...
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  • Excel User Conference (an update)

    The guys who are organising this event. (Bob Phillips, Roger Govier, Andy Pope, Charles Williams, Simon Murphy and I), have been overwhelmed by the response for the forthcoming event in London on April 1st and 2nd. We have been 'technically full' almost from the start with floods of delegates and are operating a reserve list. (We have even had to turn down adverts on the likes of Office Online, etc). As it is a free event however, people do not have huge amounts of 'skin' in the day...
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  • My First 15 Minutes?

    Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes... dunno who said that but as many of you know I live a double life as downright nice, jolly chap on one hand and geek on the other! Some time ago I wrote a blog about getting External Data into the new 2007 version of Excel. Well, it grew a little into a full-blown article and it has just been published on the main Office Online web site at Microsoft.com. The article is here ...end of 15 minutes and back to obscurity!
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  • UK Excel User Group Conference

    A meeting of the above group will take place on Wednesday 1st and Thursday 2nd April 2009 in London . This FREE event has some fantastic speakers from the Excel community. The agenda for the two days is outlined below and you can book for either or both days by emailing bookings@excelusergroup.org . Microsoft will be providing the venue and the hospitality and we look forward to a great and informative couple of days. The agenda is below, but if you want the full version with session details and...
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  • Excel 2007 - Getting External Data

    On of the most visited parts of my web site is the part on external data. Most of it was based on Excel 2003 and before, so I thought I should update it for Excel 2007. INTRODUCTION The first thing you will notice about 2007 is the ease in which you can find the data 'movement' tools. Now, say what you think about the ribbon in Excel 2007, but finding where to import and export data is not one of them! It's on the Data tab. (as below) I have only shown you the section above. The tab extends...

  • Excel List of Lists

    John Walkenbach on his new Spreadsheet Page has posted what he believes is a comprehensive list of Excel Blogs with RSS feeds. You can find it here Thankfully I made the list, but can you point us toward any that are missing? It's a nice job where you can select the blog in the left side bar and see the latest posts and comments all in one place. There are certainly several others on here he has missed but not to many that are active :-(
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  • Deploying VSTO Add-In To Multiple Users On Windows XP

    Matthew from Australia kindly dropped by to outline a solution to a tricky situation with VSTO deployment to multiple users on Windows XP. I don't profess to know the issue, but it seems like it should get a wider audience, hence the post. Here is the link to Matthew's solution.
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  • My Coding Technique

    I have recently been doing most of my coding in Visual Studio, doing some 'real' work for a change, coding using VB.net, ASP.net and ADO.net. The environment in VS2008 is much improved over the VBE in MS Office (VBA). For example, it auto-indents and, with the addition of Developer Express's Coderush product it even adds helpful lines between these indents. In large code projects it becomes a real chore to keep pressing the tab key to indent, but it is pretty essential if you are going...
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  • Alternative Pivot Tables

    As many of you know, I don't do anything with technology 'in earnest', but love tinkering and it is great to have a 'project' with a functional 'end game'. Recently, I have been a little 'off' my usual Excel activity and developing (for fun) in the evening, on trains, etc, some additional reporting for our Company Intranet, using VB.Net, ASP.Net and SQL Server. (I had already done some, but it called an iSeries server in the US, from the UK and as it has become...
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  • COUNTIF SUMIF Limitations

    I'm sure many of you knew this but it was new to me and I came across it today, so in an effort to get it out there a bit more, i document it here. It concerns the fact that COUNTIF and SUMIF (and their 2007 plural counterparts SUMIFS and COUNTIFS) carry forward the limitation that Excel has of 15 significant digits. (As does 1-2-3 and OpenOffice) http://support.microsoft.com/kb/269370 I knew this limitation, but didn't realise the two functions concerned followed this limit' I had to...

  • Summit in Seattle

    It's been some time since I posted a blog post and this is a little lame when it comes to Excel, but we are all (MVPs) in Seattle at the Global Summit this week and if there is anything we are allowed to post under our NDAs I will try and post it here. Never know until we get there what will be allowed public domain and we have to be real careful, but I will certainly be pointing the Excel Team to the v.Next forum if you still have some ideas for that. Looking forward to a great week at the 'Excel...
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  • Playing with OpenAsTextStream

    We produce individual text files for new items to go into our catalogue. These are sent to the creative people for laying out on the page. One file contains the Item#, Description, Text and Bullets for one item and is named with that item's number. Of course, for page layout it is good for them to copy and paste the text this way. It looks as below: 12345E 2500PSI 15LPM Petrol-Powered Pressure Washer This pressure washer, powered by a Honda GX160 engine, will blast away even the most stubborn...
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