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July 2009 - The Excel Team Blog

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  • Using parameters with web queries

    Today’s author is Jan Karel Pieterse, an Excel MVP. You can find more useful tips from Jan Karel on his website: http://www.jkp-ads.com/ This post shows you how to dynamically work with data from a website in Excel. Introduction Excel provides a very useful option to gather data from websites, called web queries. These have been introduced with Excel 97 and have been further enhanced in the versions released after Excel 97. This article shows how you can setup a web query so that you can make the...

  • A Sparkline Trick - Using the Horizontal Axis as a Reference Line

    In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the ways you can use sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: In the above example we have the data for the employee sign-up contest, this is a contest where employees try to get customers to sign-up for a bookstore club card. The contest has gone on for several weeks now, and each employee has a goal of 20 sign-ups per week. Right now the sparklines are conveying the history of sign-ups for each employee, for example...

  • Printing, Backstage Style

    The Office 2010 Engineering blog has a new post up about Backstage and how it improves the experience around printing.  Here’s a quote: Has the following ever happened to you? After writing a document, you format the page so it looks just right. You click Print and walk over to the printer, only to discover in horror that you forgot to set it to print two-sided, or that a last minute margin change meant the last word of your document got pushed onto its own page. You realize this as you watch...
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  • Viewing Spreadsheets in the Excel Web App

    We haven’t really gotten into the details of the Excel Web App yet here on this blog, but the Office Web Apps blog is already talking about topics that apply to the web apps as a whole.  A new post went up yesterday that discusses how the web apps are convenient for simple document viewing.  Here’s a quote: Once Office Web Apps got deployed to a SharePoint site I use all the time, I quickly became accustomed to navigating Office files as breezily as I surf the Web. I can read the things...

  • Sparklines – Lining Up the Points

    In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the ways you can use sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: In the above example we have sales for each year, the cost of sales, and net profit for that year all divided by the category of book. One of the things you can do with sparklines in Excel 2010 is to stick them in cells above or below each other and have the points line up. Doing this will allow you to see trends for multiple fields in a related way. Here...

  • Sparkline Axis Options

    In this blog post I’ll walk through some of the axis options for sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: The above sparklines are displaying the number of books by category for each month. The sparklines in this example are giving the history of the count of books for each category, and it looks like they are at their lowest over the past half year or so. Let’s take look at the axis options for these sparklines. Selecting the sparklines gives you a sparkline...

  • Formatting Sparklines

    In this blog post I’ll walk through formatting sparklines in Excel 2010 using sample sparklines from the book store demo file: The above sparklines are displaying the net profit by month for the three book stores in 2008. The net profit number alone can tell you which stores are doing well, but the sparklines help identify trends behind the number: Seattle and Houston both dipped in the summer, in general their profits climbed as the year went on, and Richmond didn’t do well until the last month...

  • Security Features in Excel 2010

    The Office Engineering blog has a post up with an overview of the security features that went into Office 2010.  Here’s a snippet: …we have designed what we have been referring to as a new security workflow, a layered defense that Office documents have to go through as part of the File Open process. We strive to make this process as invisible as possible. This means no noticeable delay in open times, as well as no dialogs asking you how you feel about security. You can read the rest of the post...

  • Adding Some Spark to Your Spreadsheets

    In this blog post I’ll walk through creating sparklines in Excel 2010 using a sample table from the book store demo file: In the table we have the sales for the month of June: a column for total sales for the month, multiple columns for each day’s sales, and rows that break out different book categories. Sparklines will really be able to enhance the table and add to the understanding of the numbers by plotting out the month’s sales day by day in a single column, in line with the data. To get started...

  • Add Buttons to the Quick Access Toolbar and Customize Button Images

    Today’s author is Ron de Bruin, an Excel MVP . You can find more useful tips from Ron and links to Excel add-ins at his website: http://www.rondebruin.nl/ This post shows you how to add a button to the Quick Access Toolbar (QAT) for one or all workbooks. It also shows an example of how you can change the image of a QAT button. One reason you might want to change a button’s image is that a lot of commands use the same button image (a green circle). For more information about adding missing built-in...
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  • Sparklines in Excel

    Thanks to Sam Radakovitz, a Program Manager on the Excel team, for putting together this series on Sparklines. For Excel 2010 we’ve implemented sparklines, “intense, simple, word-sized graphics” , as their inventor Edward Tufte describes them in his book Beautiful Evidence .  Sparklines help bring meaning and context to numbers being reported and, unlike a chart, are meant to be embedded into what they are describing: In the above example, the sales number alone gives you a single moment in...

  • Excel 2010 – The 10,000 ft. View

    Before we begin our whirlwind tour of all things Excel, I thought I’d give you a quick glance at the things we’ve done. The “table of contents” if you will. That way you’ll have an idea of what to expect in the coming weeks, and I hope it gives you a sense of the amount of work we’ve put into this release. Many of our investments in this release are a continuation of the goals and vision that started in the 2007 release. A few examples: Excel 2007 debuted brand new conditional formatting features...
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  • Excel Blog Facelift

    Since we're now in "2010 mode", updating the look of the blog site seemed like a good idea. A facelift was overdue. Hope you like it. I also added a list of links to other Microsoft sites and blogs related to Office 2010. You can find it in the side-bar at right. Read More...

  • Sneak Preview of Project Gemini

    On the topic of “teasers”, one of the things we’ll be talking about in the coming weeks is project Gemini. I won’t get into the details just yet (otherwise it wouldn’t be a teaser), other than to say it’s a powerful data analysis feature, it’s an add-in to Excel (i.e. not a built-in Excel feature), and it’s the result of collaboration between the Excel and SQL teams. The BI Blog has been covering all news related to Gemini . From the BI Blog, here are a couple sneak peak videos : BI Power Hour: Sneak...

  • Microsoft Office 2010 Technical Preview Released

    You’ve most likely heard the news by now. At the Worldwide Partner Conference in New Orleans, Microsoft announced that the next version of Office reached its Technical Preview engineering milestone. You can read the highlights in this press release (and I’ll include some more links below). I’m guessing the first question on people’s minds is “how do I get a copy?”. Currently the Technical Preview program is “by invitation only” and is not broadly available to the public. There is a waitlist you can...
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