Mac Mojo: The Office for Mac Team Blog

Under-Appreciated Excel Feature Of The Week: Goal Seek

Gavin Shearer — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 18:10:10 GMT

Last month's post about Data Tables generated a surprising amount of e-mail from readers. Lots of people, it seems, are interested in learning how to get more out of Excel.

In that spirit, I thought I'd take some time to discuss and showcase a companion feature to Data Tables, called Goal Seek.

As I wrote about Data Tables:

Put plainly, Data Tables let you do "what if..." analyses in Excel. They let you see how the results of a formula change as its underlying variables change. Data Tables let you see an entire range of solutions, rather than just one single answer.

In that post, we explored Data Tables through the frame of taking out a large loan. The feature let us see how our monthly payment would vary if we changed the length of the loan or its interest rate. Our end product was a matrix of numbers that lets us see, clearly, how rates and terms affected our monthly payment.

However, there are a number of times when we're not looking for a table of results, but instead are concerned with optimizing around a single variable. For instance, if I go out to buy a car, I have a certain amount of money - say, $350 - that I can afford to put toward a payment each month. In cases like these, I'd much prefer not to look at a matrix - instead, I'd like to just know how much I can get for my money.

This is where you use Goal Seek.

Like Data Tables, Goal Seek lets you do "what if..." analysis, but it will solve for a specific, single answer. Here, I'm really only interested in one question: given that I have $350 a month to spend, how much car can I afford?

I'll walk through an example to show how it's done.

We first need to set up our spreadsheet. Just as we did with Data Tables, we will make a few assumptions about our loan. (If you want to grab the finished spreadsheet from the Data Tables exercise (download here), it will save you a bit of time.)

Just to plug in some numbers, let's assume that we're borrowing $25,000 for 4 years at 7% interest. If we set up our spreadsheet as follows and use the Excel PMT function (=PMT(B4/12,B3*12,B2)), we will get a monthly payment of ... $598.66.

A payment of $598.66 is quite a bit more than the $350 I have to spend every month. So now it's time to figure out how much car I can actually afford.

Go to the "Tools" menu and select "Goal Seek..." (it's about 2/3 of the way down the list). The Goal seek dialog will appear:

There are three variables to worry about, here: set cell, to value, and by changing cell. The nice thing is that they work as a sentence:

Set the cell [X] to the value [Y] by changing the cell [Z].

In other words: you're asking Excel to change the value of cell Z until cell X is equal to some value, Y.

With that in mind, filling out Goal Seek is pretty easy. On our spreadsheet, we want to set cell B5 ("Monthly Payment") equal to the value of our monthly payment ($350). And we want Excel to do that by changing cell B2 ("Amount To Be Borrowed").

Setting Goal Seek to these values, we get:

It's worth noting that "to value" is set to minus 350 (-$350). This is because a monthly payment is a cash outflow - it's money you're giving away each month. This is how the Excel PMT function thinks about monthly payments, and, since we're relying on the PMT function to do all our heavy lifting in the math department, we need to make sure we're speaking a language the function understands. (It's a quirk, but an important one.)

Click OK, and Excel will crunch the numbers. Goal Seek will come back and let you know if it found a solution:

Click OK again, and this dialog will vanish. You'll find yourself back out at your workbook, which should now contain the answer to our question:

Looks like I can afford to borrow $14,616 for my new car - which means I'm looking less at a new Mini Cooper, and more at a shiny Toyota Yaris. Pretty cool, huh?

So that's Goal Seek - yet another under-appreciated Excel feature. As you might imagine, it's a pretty powerful (and profoundly useful) tool. Personally, I use it all the time for situations like this (which seem to crop up in business pretty regularly).

If you'd like to see my spreadsheet, I've attached it to this post - just click here.

Best of luck!

12.1.4 Fixes Entourage Meeting Invite Issue

Andy Ruff — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 17:10:00 GMT

We’ve been working hard for the last week and a half to bring Entourage users today’s 12.1.4 update. It’s incredibly frustrating when we get through a release process and a new issue is introduced by an update. When we start to hear feedback and customer reports about issues with an update, I simply cringe because so much work goes into preventing that from happening. Unfortunately, the recent Office for Mac 2008 12.1.3 update introduced a bug that prevented some Entourage users from sending meeting invites to others. We’re sorry.

However, we also believe it’s better to pair an apology with a solution. With that in mind, with the just released 12.1.4 update, meeting invites will be working as expected once again for all Entourage users.

A lot of work goes into every update release to make sure that we are improving the product's quality. With every update, each and every change that goes into the release is under tight review. There are multi-developer code reviews, focused test passes, and verifications with targeted customers who reported the issue we are targeting to fix. Even then, sometimes things do not work out. With 12.1.3, we did all of the above, yet two cases slipped-through:

If you set-up your Exchange account after you configured an IMAP or POP account, invites would fail. In reviewing the code and test planning, an assumption about the order of account creation impacting meeting invites was unknown to anyone. We've made some changes to make sure that any such assumptions about ordering are now irrelevant both in Entourage’s code and in our testing efforts.

There are some very rare cases in which the Drafts folder on your Exchange server can no longer be properly accessed by either Entourage or Outlook for certain types of operations. The 12.1.3 update changed Entourage so that all invites were moved to your Exchange drafts folder, stamped with a few properties to make sure they showed-up correctly in Outlook, and then sent along the way. This was a pretty big change and exactly the right way to solve the Outlook-to-Entourage calendar interop issue we fixed in 12.1.3, but it introduced a problem where those few users with malfunctioning Drafts folders also were unable to send invites.

We've addressed this by providing a fall-back mechanism that won't prevent you from sending an invite but will warn you that there are problems with your Drafts folder that your Exchange administrator may need to resolve. In addition, we learned to do additional testing around cases where a mailbox does not behave as expected on the Exchange server. A lot of times these problems are not apparent to you, but they can result in some very difficult issues for a client like Entourage or Outlook to handle.

Please download 12.1.4 and enjoy sending meeting invites out again.

-Andy

New MacBU GM!

Eric Wilfrid — Fri, 31 Oct 2008 18:10:02 GMT

Today I’m delighted to introduce myself as the new general manager of the MacBU. This change in leadership comes as Craig Eisler has been promoted to a new role within the Entertainment & Devices division of Microsoft.

A little about myself: I am a 14-year Microsoft veteran and a charter member of MacBU, building Mac software at Microsoft since 1997. Most recently I was the Product Unit Manager of the MacBU Silicon Valley team, based in Mountain View, CA. In that role I managed a team of engineers in developing Office for Mac and other MacBU products.

My first Mac was (and is) a beautiful SE/30 that I took with me to college. It still boots, still runs Word 3, and still has the 5MB of RAM I needed in order to use it for my first Computer Science class. The Mac, Office, and MacBU have come a long way since those early days, and it’s been amazing to be a part of that change.

I recently moved with my family from Mountain View to the Redmond area. After visiting many times in the past 12 years, it’s fun to finally have an office in the Redmond MacBU building. And now I get to make my regular trip in reverse as I work with the team in Mountain View and Apple in Cupertino. I’m excited to take on this new challenge, and I feel lucky to work with such a committed, passionate, and awesome team. Our best days are yet to come.

See you at Macworld!

-Eric

The Ways and Means of a Program Manager in the Macintosh Business Unit

Blair Neumann — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 10:11:00 GMT

Picture frame effect created with one click using PowerPoint 2008 for Mac

(Formatting Palette | Quick Styles and Effects)

I mentioned in a previous post that I’m not an actual people manager despite the word "manager" being in my job title. Nonetheless, I am personally responsible and accountable for "getting things done". So how does one get things done without explicit organizational authority? It turns out to not be terribly difficult; you just need to have a few tricks at your disposal.

As a person named Blair myself, I’ve found that having an unopened bag of potato chips (aka, crisps) labeled "Blair’s Death Rain" can be a particularly effective tool for getting things done. Much like having an unopened can labeled "Whoop ass", I find that this simple-looking bag of chips helps connote a certain abiding threat level (and perhaps even an authority) well outside the scope of my official organizational role.

It might (or might not) help that my potato chips also have the word "Naked" printed on them. I imagine the effect of opening this bag as being something akin to a giant naked blue Viking berserker god hurling hammers and steaming basalts at anything that lies in its path. Not a bad image for someone without explicitly hiring and firing authority to promote for themselves.

I haven’t yet opened my bag of Death Rain, despite its printed expiration date. My official reason for leaving the bag sealed is (of course) that I haven’t yet needed to break it open: The mere threat of opening the bag has so far been sufficient for my purposes. But of course part of me also just doesn’t want to test the theory: I’d hate to open the bag to find not a lava-hurling lord of Valhalla but a few simple, tasty, if somewhat stale, potato chips. I shudder to think of what might happen were that to be the case.

MacBU at MacMania

Kurt Schmucker — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 19:11:55 GMT

For the past ten days or so, I have been giving Office 2008 demos, assisting Office 2008 customers, and generally representing MacBU at a Mac Conference in Europe. Where is this conference exactly, you ask? It is in Genoa (Italy), Messina (Sicily), Alexandria (Egypt), Limassol (Cyprus), Marmaris (Turkey), and Santorini and Katakolm (Greece). How can a Mac event be in all these cities and countries during the same conference? Well, all these are seaports, and the conference is on a boat. (Sorry, “on a ship.” – I still haven’t gotten the knack of using all the special nautical terms.)

MacMania is a Mac conference that takes place on a cruise ship, and MacMania 8 was a cruise in the Eastern Mediterranean:

The conference is about 250 people from all walks of life, but sharing the same characteristic that they are such Apple/Mac diehards that they even spend their vacations learning more about the Mac. The ship has over 2000 passengers and about 950 crew members, so as you can guess, the ship is pretty big, with more than ten floors (oops, I mean “decks” – more nautical terms) and many banks of elevators, multiple restaurants, and even a small mall.

I presented on Office 2008. Sal Soghoian, a product manager / evangelist from Apple, talked about AppleScript, Automator, and Leopard, and Josimar King, a trainer from Apple, did lengthy presentations on each of the applications in the iLife and IWork suites. Other speakers talked about photography and managing all your photos, about the best iPhone apps for road warriors, about efficient e-mailing, and many other topics. In addition, there was a daily “Ingenious Bar” where the speakers and other Mac experts worked one-on-one with the MacMania attendees on specific issues. These informal consultations proved to be a great way to hear about, and work on the tasks that customers use our products to solve, and to gather suggestions for improvements in future releases – such suggestions I have already sent to the product teams. It also turned out to be a forum to hear what has worked really well, as several MacMania attendees went out of their way to tell me of positive interactions with the Microsoft Product Support team that covers Office for Mac, and the how much improved they have found the Office 2008 user interface to be.

The press were also represented by individuals like David Pogue (New York Times), Phyllis Eliasberg (ABC News), and Shawn King (Your Mac Life).

Photo courtesy of Shawn King.

Photos courtesy of Karen Schmucker

The next conference that you’ll find MacBU at is Macworld Conference & Expo 2009. As always, a big part of the MacBU team will make their way to Moscone Center in San Francisco in early January. I’m also coordinating a two day session, “Getting the Most Out of Office 2008 for Mac”, part of the Power Tools Conference at MacWorld. If you want to learn more about Office from the team that built it, go to the Macworld Expo site to learn more and sign up for this session.

you're my favourite

Nadyne Mielke — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:11:08 GMT

Like pretty much everyone else in the known world, I get way too much email. Given how much time I spend in Entourage and how important it is to my workflow, I have an extensive group of folders to manage all of the email that I send, receive, and keep. My incoming mail gets sorted into one of 34 different folders [1] automatically using rules. Then I've got several dozen other folders where I sort my mail after I've dealt with it.

There are some folders which I care about much more than others. My main inbox is the most important one. Emails that are specific to the applications that I work on are also important, as are emails from my user experience peers. But they're buried in my folder structure. What's a girl to do?

Enter Entourage 2008 and the favourites bar. The favourites bar is right below the toolbar. Here's mine:

I love so many things about my favourites bar. It means that, no matter where I am in Entourage, I can quickly jump to my most important folders. It shows me when there's new mail in those important folder. Entourage's dock icon is helpful in that it tells me when I have new mail, but this gives me much more detail. The favourites bar lets me I tell the difference between new mail that needs my attention now and stuff that can wait until later.

So how do you add folders to your favourites bar? It's easy: in Entourage, choose a folder from the folder list, then drag it to the favourites bar. If you ever make a change to that folder (say, if you change its name), Entourage automatically changes it in the favourites bar, too. If you decide that you don't want something in your favourites bar, select it from the favourites bar and drag it off.

I mostly just use the favourites bar for mail folders, but you can put anything there that you like. I sometimes use it to quickly access a specific project from the Project Center if I find myself referring to it a lot. I've seen some folks put a shortcut to their calendar there, which is especially useful if you have multiple Exchange accounts set up in Entourage.

What's in your favourites bar?

I have to admit that I didn't realise that I had 34 folders just for incoming mail! So I decided that I don't want to know how many other folders that I have. Let's just say that when I have Entourage maximised on my 24-inch monitor in my office, it takes six clicks to scroll through them all ...

Providing feedback on the Help content

Radhika S — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 12:11:30 GMT

As part of content analysis (see my earlier post about this What happens to the content feedback you send us), the content team at MacBU reviews all feedback to determine what actions we need to take to improve our content. We also work with our product teams to translate the customer pain points, which helps them develop great products that meet our user’s needs.

In order to make sure we are hearing you right, it is very important that you describe your problem well, so we can address it the right way.

Here is an example of good feedback for the Help topic titled “Give your Office documents a stylish look”:

I need to know how to change the default paragraph spacing. I don't want an extra space after all my paragraphs. How do I change the default spacing? Please put this info in help asap. Thanks!

This is great. I know that I need to add information about setting defaults.

Here is feedback for the same topic:

"bad username and password"

In this case, I am not really sure what the user is trying to accomplish. Unfortunately, I have to ignore the comment and move on to comments that explicitly state the problem.

Please give us a detailed description of the problem. This will help us better address your needs.

When you are reading one of our help pages and want to make a suggestion, you can use the feedback section at the bottom of the page.

If you want to provide feedback about the product, post your suggestions to the Product Suggestions page. This is to make sure that the right folks are listening to you and acting upon your requests.

A huge thanks to all of you who continue to provide valuable suggestions that help us help you.

Embrace Your Inner Packrat...and Gobble Up a Deal.

Sheridan Jones — Thu, 27 Nov 2008 19:11:18 GMT

I’ll tell you a personal secret: I think I’m a digital hoarder. I have over a terabyte of stored documents, pictures, videos, music and fonts on eight hard drives in my office. I’ve maxed out storage limits on every network drive assigned to me by the Microsoft datacenter. I don’t know if I really need 13,000 fonts, all of our marketing and training materials since Office ’98, and every funny picture my husband ever sent to me, but there’s NO WAY I’m giving up my 20 year collection of royalty free photos and clip art. I was a small business owner and designer too long to delete potentially useful files. In fact, I still have every creative project I ever produced. Storage is cheap, I reason, but my time, on the other hand…and so it goes.

In any case, I have amassed a massive stash of digital data in my deceptively neat office, and I’m guessing I’m not alone. Don’t we all have orphaned files abandoned out there on CDs and servers and hard drives? Don’t you wish you could get them back, doing something useful, without mounting every drive, opening every folder or Quick-Looking every file?

It used to cause me a certain amount of unrest, thinking of those files I’d squirreled away for good reason, but had lost track of – valuable assets I was wasting because I couldn’t find and use them when I needed them. For example, I scoured the web and downloaded MORE fonts (pirate themed) for Talk Like a Pirate Day because I couldn’t find the ones I knew I already had on some disk somewhere. Time suck – whoosh! Fifteen minutes gone forever.

If you have a lot of files stored on external devices – DVDs, hard drives, servers, whatever – and you’d like to get them indexed, organized, and useful again, you might like the tool I use – Microsoft Expression Media. Expression Media lets you make visual catalogs of all your files, extremely easily, wherever they are. Just drag and drop your disk to a new catalog to get started. Once you’ve created the catalog, even if the drive isn’t connected, you can still browse for and quickly find forgotten files. Don’t remember the name of the customer contract you created last year, but “you’ll know it if you see it”? No worries – you can isolate all your .doc files, and scan through them rapidly and easily. I can power through those 13,000 fonts in under a minute. Thumbnails make it easy to find the one I want; I can even open or install the file right from Expression Media. For the uber-organized, keywords and ratings can be applied to anything. For me, it’s enough to be able to group file types like .pdfs from multiple drives, and scroll through them until I find the one I want.

Expression Media is actually a powerful Digital Asset Management application. It’s very popular with designers and photographers – lots of people I know started using it back when it was called iView. I wish I’d had it when I ran a small business – the amount of stress I could have saved myself (and my team!) with just the basic functions of Expression Media for file management would have made a difference in our productivity and bottom line.

There are so many things beyond organizing you can do with Expression Media. Create back-up copies of important files to DVD, create Silverlight-enabled web galleries and upload them automatically to your website, batch convert image, movie or sound files from one type to another (say MP3 to WAV.) But for me, the killer use has been to simply keep track of my stuff, and to help my inner packrat to be more productive and peaceful.

It’s a good tool for team collaboration too. I’ve created catalogs of all of our marketing assets like logos and photos, and shared those with people I work with. Now, instead of asking me for the umpteenth time where to find the Microsoft logo in .eps format, they can simply look at the catalog and open the file directly from the server we all share. The catalogs stay up-to-date because I enabled the folder-watching feature, so anything I add to the server gets added to their catalogs too, automatically. Catalogs are compatible with Mac and Windows, so my internal and external teams are able to share files and work together more efficiently regardless of what platform they’re on, just like Office for Mac helps Mac users work more seamlessly with Windows users on Office documents.

Our team created some videos sampling what you can do with Expression Media, especially in concert with Office 2008. These videos aren’t quite ready for prime-time, but I quickly put up a special sneak peek channel on You Tube for MacMojo readers: www.youtube.com/msmacbu. Be sure to watch the video entitled Office 2008 Special Media Edition…extra street cred to you if you can name the Song, Band, Album & Record Label in that video. Watch it in high res if you’ve got the bandwidth, it’s much better that way. Eventually, all of these will all be available on www.microsoft.com/mac.

Are you ready to embrace your inner packrat, and gobble up a great deal this Thanksgiving day? If you haven’t upgraded to Office 2008 yet, surf the web for holiday deals on Office 2008 Special Media Edition, which includes Expression Media as well as the full, Exchange-enabled suite of Office 2008 for Mac. Great discounts are available throughout the holiday season, but Thursday, November 28th & Friday November 29th there are MASSIVE bargains available (like 75% off the normal price – you can save something like $350!) If you’re already an Office for Mac user (any version) be sure to look at the upgrade prices for an even better deal.

This Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for a lot of things, big and small – and one of them is the peaceful feeling I get knowing I can find what I’m looking for. Happy Holidays, everyone – may your days be merry and your media more manageable.

A Circle of Fifths: How I Learned Music Theory using Excel

Blair Neumann — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 10:12:00 GMT

Someone recently asked me what I do when I’m not playing Ultimate. I responded by saying "I play a lot of guitar" (deftly sidestepping a conversation about my day job). And while I’ve played guitar for almost 20 years, I’ve also spent most of those two decades stubbornly refusing to learn any music theory. "My guitar gods had self-taught so why should I not do the same?" I reasoned. But I recently discovered that I really do want to understand (if not practice) music theory, so I turned to several sources, one of which was Excel.

"Why use Excel to teach yourself music theory?" I ask myself. To which I retort, "Music theory is all about patterns in series and Excel is an excellent and convenient tool for generating such series and manipulating them to expose their patterns." Convinced, I opened my MacBook and launched Excel in hopes of discovering the patterns underlying the Circle of Fifths.

I’m not completely naïve about music theory. I know the names of the twelve tones (A, A#, B, C, C#, et al.) used in Western music, and I understand that A-sharp and B-flat really are two names for the same tone. In other words, I sort of generally grok the black and white key arrangement on the piano keyboard or the fret board of a guitar. It’s not much of a starting point, but it’s enough: I enter the twelve tones in a column in Excel.

I also understand that the tones repeat themselves in cycles called octaves. For example, the tones G, G#/Ab, A ascend into each other in exactly the same way that C, C#/Db, D do. I set the value of cell A13 to "=A1" and then use AutoFill to complete a second octave in cells A13 through A24. Cool, but while this second octave will be totally useful (for reasons that may become obvious shortly), I don’t need to see it any longer, so I select rows 13 through 24 and hide them.

My next goal for Excel is to generate all of the major scales in Western music. There are twelve of these, one for each of the twelve tones, and each is derived from a common seven-tone pattern based on its root tone: up 2, up 2, up 1, up 2, up 2, up 2. Excel can handle this. I start by entering the common pattern in the A row using cell references instead of values.

The picture above shows what I typed into cells B1 through G1, but the leading "=" characters mean these cells should compute their values (like we did in cell A13). What Excel actually displays looks like the following: It’s the A-major scale!

At this point we can take advantage of the same powerful AutoFill feature we used to generate the second octave, this time to generate all the rest of the major scales. Are you ready for this? Excel sure is. Just select cells B1 through G1 and drag from the lower right-hand corner of that selection down to highlight cells B1 through G12. Voila: All of the major scales, and barely any hassle.

This is a great start. I just generated every major scale by typing just 12 literal values plus an additional 7 cell references into Excel and using AutoFill to generate the rest. Totally great, but it’s not yet the fabled Circle of Fifths. How do we get there from here?

I know the Circle of Fifths organizes major scales by the number of sharps and flats in each scale. Think of an analog clock where 1:00 is the major scale with 1 sharp, 11:00 is the major scale with 1 flat, 2:00 is the major scale with 2 sharps, 10:00 is the major scale with 2 flats, etc. I also recall that A-sharp and B-flat are two names for the same tone (and likewise for the other sharp/flat pairs), so I could also think of the same analog clock where 1:00 is one of two major scales with 1 sharp/flat while 11:00 is the other.

I create a column H to list the number of sharps and flats in each row using Excel’s COUNTIF function to do the heavy lifting. I enter the following value into cell H1 to get the number of sharps and flats in the A-major scale, then use AutoFill to generate similar results for the rest of the major scales: =COUNTIF(A1:G1, "?#/?b")

I want to sort by column H but there’s a problem: The way I set this up, all those cell references assume that we’re sorted by column A. No big deal though: I no longer need the cell references now that the scales are all generated. I copy the whole range A1 to G12 and use Paste Special to paste back over that same range as values. Now I can sort by column H without turning the major scales to jazz!

It’s still not the Circle of Fifths, but it’s looking a lot more like my analog clock. Other than the zeros and the fives, each of the pairs of scales from column H shares a common property: One of the two has a sharp/flat in the 4th position (column D) and the other has a sharp/flat in the 7th position (column G) while neither scale has both. Interestingly, two of the three scales with five sharps/flats in also share this property (the third is just special: we’ll call it 6 sharps/flats for reasons that will be explained shortly). I create a column I to expose this property then sort by it. Resorting by column H within those results gives me just what I’ve been looking for.

Behold: The Circle of Fifths!

I understand now why that F#/Gb-major scale with five sharps/flats is really six sharps or six flats. Think of F as "E-sharp" or B as "C-flat" depending on the key: If you’re in the key of F#-major then F is "E-sharp" but if you’re in the key of Gb-major then B is "C-flat". It’s sleight of hand really: They really are just different ways of thinking about the same thing, but apparently it’s musically pure to think about it this way. (There’s some similar musical purity where the major scales with five sharps and flats [B-major and C#/Db-major] do double-duty as major scales with seven sharps or seven flats, but I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure that out.)

So what did I learn from all this? Well, for one thing I learned how to read sheet music since now I know what it means for a key signature to have (for example) two sharps or four flats. I also learned to look at the fret board on my guitar completely differently than how I did before: I care now much more deeply for the "natural" tones A, B, C, et al. and respect the special place that their sharp and flat accents can have depending on the key. And I learned how to play in any key, at least in theory (certainly not yet in practice). That’s a lot to learn from just a couple handfuls of values, some cell references and simple formulas, sorting, and a little AutoFill magic from Excel.