Excel Programming

A Custom Task Pane (CTP) is a user interface component in Office which is used to provide a non-modal window. Some of Excel's features, such as the PivotTable field list and Reseach tool, use CTPs. CTPs are exposed to customer extensions via the Office...

One of the controls frequently used by Excel is the reference edit box. This control is used to gather a range address from the user. The user specifies the range either by typing in its address or by using the mouse and clicking on the actual cells they...

I know that posts have been few and far between (ok ..non-existant) this month. I hope this isn't something that will be repeated ... this month has just been crazy busy with deadlines (I'm sure you know that feeling...) Anyway, I have a healthy backlog...

Busy times at Microsoft has meant that I've been slower than usual in posting recently. My current expectation is to be over my heavy workload by about mid-June. I'll continue to post in the meantime; but at a slower pace. TechEd is being held in Orlando...

Writing our own, custom worksheet functions is a great way to extend Excel. Before Excel 2002 we developed custom functions by either writing them using VBA inside an XLA or by using C/C++ inside an XLL. Excel 2002 introduced a new type of addin called...

One other area I work in is Business Intelligence. These days BI is an important technology to an increasing number of companies. There are many great BI tools out there, one of which is (of course) Excel. One of the things that makes Excel such a...

Office Open XML (OOXML), the XML file formats used by Office 2007, today won the ISO vote which paves the way for it becoming an ISO standard. This is very exciting news indeed for Excel programmability. Coupled with the new Open XML SDK that we announced...

The new XML file formats in Office 2007 open the door to lots of exciting programmability solutions. For example, the files can be created and consumed without automating Excel.exe. This really helps server-side solutions. It also aids batch processing...

When presented with a table of data in Excel, sometimes it is useful to be able to learn some quick facts about it. One quick fact which is often useful is the distribution of values within a particular column. For example, if we have a column called...

Named ranges are great. They enable us to assign a name to a collection of cells and use that name in code and worksheet functions. However, named ranges tend to be static. That is, they tend to represent a fixed set of cells, such as, A1:E100. But sometimes...

I thought it would be useful to provide a list of some good articles on customising the Office ribbon: 3-part Article on Ribbon Customisation ; Ribbon Developer Centre ; Jenson Harris' blog ; Repurposing Commands on the Ribbon ; Hiding...

After I posted about getting up-and-running with managed code and Excel , I realised that I was really writing a brief introduction to coding a C# Excel addin. Then I realised that there are two more areas that need to be covered before we would be ready...

When coding in C# with Excel, it doesn't take long before you encounter the dreaded 'optional parameter' issue. If you have ever copied-and-pasted numerous System.Reflection. Missing .Value statements then you've probably wondered a few things. Firstly...

If you are using PivotTables against an OLAP data source you may find it useful to be able to create your own custom, calculated measures and sets. These calculations are client-side meaning they exist inside Excel and you don't have to change the server...

We have recently launched a code sharing community web site called MSDN Code Gallery . MSDN Code Gallery hosts code snippets and entire projects that have been shared with the community. You can publish your own code or search for and download other...

Sometimes it would be useful to be able to use cells to select items in a PivotTable. For example, let's say we have a PivotTable containing a field called Region. Instead of using the filter dropdown to select the region from a list it would be nice...

As well as C/C++ and VBA, I'll be blogging a lot about managed code. So I figured it would be useful to lay out the basics of how Excel and managed code interoperate today. If you write Excel addins you’ve probably seen articles like this one that...

<Fanfare>Hello. My name is Gabhan and this is my new blog dedicated to Excel Programming.</Fanfare> I work as a Program Manager on the Excel product team and I thought it would be useful/fun/exciting to dedicate a blog to programming with...