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Microsoft Excel

The team blog for Microsoft Excel and Excel Services.
Let’s start with some "big" news …

Greetings.  My name is David Gainer, and I am the Group Program Manager for Microsoft Excel.  Starting today, I am joining several other members of the Microsoft Office team in sharing information about the upcoming release of Microsoft Office.  Specifically, I am going to be writing about what’s new in Excel 12 (that’s a working title, not an official name).  The Excel team is very excited about the product we are building, and I am looking forward to being able to talk about all the great work the team has been doing publicly.  I plan to write this blog from now until around the general availability of Office 12, and I am hoping to talk in some depth about all the different features we have added to Excel 12.  As things unfold, I look forward to reading your comments and hearing suggestions on what would you would like to read about. 

With that said, let’s finish this initial post with some discussion of a feature. 

Probably the most common question the Excel team gets from our customers is “when are you going to add more rows/more columns/more rows and more columns”.  There are many different scenarios behind these requests.  Some customers want to be able to analyze more data than Excel has rows, some customers want to track more daily information than Excel has columns, and other customers want to perform matrix math on large matrices of thousands of elements.  There are plenty of other scenarios too.  Well, the answer to the question is “in Excel 12.”  Specifically, the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns.  That’s 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV. 

This is an exciting feature for us, because it is a feature that helps a very broad range of our customers, and we are looking forward to seeing what folks create with a bigger grid.

Of course, rows and columns aren’t the only things customers have been asking for more of.  Next time, I will review all of the other places where Excel 12 gives you “more”.

Posted: Friday, September 23, 2005 7:21 AM by David Gainer

Comments

Cindy said:

<<the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. >>

Wow! I'll be looking forward to learning how we'll be able to navigate that... :-)
# September 23, 2005 4:26 AM

Jan Karel Pieterse said:

Hi David,

Great news! This is one feature change I have been waiting for for more than a decade!

Regards,

Ja Karel Pieterse
Excel MVP
# September 23, 2005 5:26 AM

Rob van Gelder said:

Hi David,

Wow, that's a great start to your blog.

A couple of questions:

1. If I have a named range of XX123, will my formula =XX123 then refer to the cell reference or to the named reference?
2. Which approach will you take to resolve this issue? Conflicting names checker or an xl2003 compatibility mode?

Thanks,
Rob
# September 23, 2005 7:39 AM

Mark Dowling said:

Thank you!


Q. Will the number of unique elements in a pivot table expand as well?
# September 23, 2005 8:05 AM

Amit Agarwal said:

J-walk is also covering Excel 12 in his blog.

Hope to get even more useful info here.
# September 23, 2005 8:46 AM

Dick said:

But what if I want 45 columns for every day of the year? Just kidding. Great first post. This feature was so universally desired, I think, that you may have set the bar too high. Or maybe the rest of the new features are just that good. I look forward to reading.
# September 23, 2005 9:34 AM

Jiri Cihar said:

Thank you indeed.

What about VBA - will be supported? There is a lot of rumours about future this enviroment.
Could you tell us more about that?

Best Regards

Jiri Cihar
# September 23, 2005 9:53 AM

Samuel Jack said:

Just out of interest: why 16,384? At least it's a power of 2 (2^14), I suppose!
# September 23, 2005 10:01 AM

James said:

Are you guys considering multi-threading the core libraries? Lots of yummy dual-coreness to be slurped up by the time Office 12 hits the stores.

-James
# September 23, 2005 10:57 AM

Marcos Martins said:

Greats!!

I'm wainting for more elements in Pivot Tables to work with texts in data.

-Marcos Martins
# September 23, 2005 11:04 AM

Murray Shactman said:

Over 1 million rows! WOW! That's the best news I've heard all week about anything.
# September 23, 2005 12:41 PM

Simon Murphy said:

David
Thanks for the post - glad to see a bit of info appearing - we're all pretty keen to see whats in store.

<<we are looking forward to seeing what folks create with a bigger grid.>>

Bigger, harder to maintain Monsters??

Are you going to have worksheet based user defined functions to help people simplify those monster VLOOKUP/INDEX/OFFSET formulas?


cheers
Simon
# September 23, 2005 3:48 PM

David Peterson said:

I would like to see a Duplicate function, instead of having to write a custom formula every time, or create a Wizard that will walk people through the process. Hopefully you've increased the cell character display limitation (1024). I work at a help desk, and these are some of the most frequent questions I get. I constantly have to remind my customers that Excel is not a word processor. Otherwise, the Row / Column increases sound fantastic, as it will reduce support calls for Access, which has a much higher learning curve.
# September 23, 2005 4:04 PM

Blake Handler said:

Wow that's great -- I can't wait to hear more.

But can my fellow blog readers pah-lease give David a wee bit of breathing room and NOT bombard him with your questions????
# September 23, 2005 4:47 PM

Jan Nordgreen said:

Why have a restriction on number of rows and columns at all?

There is no restriction on how long a MS Word document can be, so why should Excel be different?

# September 23, 2005 5:40 PM

sudar said:

I really like the new feature.
What about RAM requirement and speed issue?

Regards
Sudar
# September 24, 2005 12:23 AM

Nesz said:

Hello

How to create data

from MySQL to Excel File? (xls, not csv, with formulas and maybe charts...)

is any opensource solutions?
(PHP, Ruby, Python, ASP...)

sorry for "bad english"
# September 24, 2005 2:51 AM

Rajeev Nair said:

Hi David,

Its a great news..! just want to ask one question, is it going to include feature like Sorting of Sheet names in Excel 12 .. ?

Regds; Rajeev Nair
# September 24, 2005 8:11 AM

John Browne said:

Good news about the additional rows, but the existing limit does cause some applications to be moved to Access that should always have been in Access.

Will Excel 12 recognise numbers as positive values in arithmetic by default, without having to prefix the first with + or =. e.g. 2+2, instead of +2+2? For an application largely used for numerical analysis, it is frustrating to have to prefix an existing cell value with a +/=, and then append the remainder of the sum.
# September 24, 2005 7:23 PM

Carson Cheng said:

I hope that Excel 12 (and other Office members as well) can handle long text better. The current 255-character limit is simply annoying.

I am having very unpleasant experience when I
1) export long text from Access to Excel,
2) mail merge long text from Excel to Word,
3) copy sheets with long text even within Excel,
4) spell check cells with long text
...

My workarounds, which well illustrate my pain, are
1) export a query to csv or html first and then open it with Excel
2) add a dummy record with long text right under the header
3) copy the used range of the spreadsheet again (if I copy the whole spreadsheet, it will take a long time)
4) manually correct the spellings (and honestly it's not that easy to locate a word in the formula box)

I hope Excel 12 can make a change.

Thank you very much!

Carson
MVP from Hong Kong
# September 25, 2005 5:07 AM

Mario Goebbels said:

Seriously, I can partly understand the increase in rows, but columns? Anyone that needs such huge matrices for any type of math must be nuts using Excel instead of a real math application.
# September 25, 2005 11:37 AM

A.Baradharajan said:

Thank you

We need the facility to place more length of string in a Cell
# September 26, 2005 6:25 AM

David Gainer said:

Greetings again. Thanks very much for the interest and questions and comments. Let me see if I can answer some of the questions now; some I will save for later posts.

Rob – Great question. Assuming the file that has a named range of XX123 is an Excel 2003 file, the answer depends on what you do with the file you when you open it in Excel 12. If you leave it as an Excel 2003 file, nothing changes, but you will not be able to use the additional rows or columns until you upgrade the file to an Excel 12 file. If you upgrade the file to an Excel 12 file, Excel 12 will transform names such as “XX123” to be “_XX123”, and we transform all references to names such to refer to the new names. We also alert the user, and we have better name management tools (to be covered in a later post) to further adjust the names as you wish.

Mark and Marcos – Yes, we will be expanding the number of unique elements in a PivotTable as well, as well as several other PivotTable “limits”. See my next post for details.

Jiri - We realize that our customers have an enormous investment in VBA solutions. VBA will continue to be supported in Office 12 and beyond, and is a critical part of our Developer offerings.

Samuel – Correct, 2^14 for columns and 2^20 for rows.

James - We have definitely done some performance work – more on that in a later post.

Simon – We have done some work that I believe will help you - more on that in a later post.

David - We have done a feature to make removing duplicates easier – I will devote a whole post to that at some point. Additionally, we have increased the character display limitations – see my next post for a discussion of all the “limits” we have raised.

Nesz - If you can create a text file or XML file, you can import that into Excel.

Rajeev - We haven’t done any work to enable “automatic” sorting of sheet names this release – the capabilities here are the same as Excel 2003 (drag-drop resorting of sheets).

John - There has been no change in this part of our formula parsing logic in Excel 12.

Carson - Yes, we have addressed the 255-character limit for the scenarios that you outline in your comment. See next post for details.

A.Baradharajan – We have changed several “limits” related to text in cells. See next post for details.
# September 27, 2005 12:39 AM

Boris said:

Are you going to improve the headers and footers interface? Have you seen this link?

http://bygsoftware.com/haf/
# September 27, 2005 3:41 AM

Boris (again) said:

Printing: We've got columns and headers that print on each page, what we need are FOOTER rows in which we can include total formulas for the data above since the previos footer rows (does that make sense?)

Pip pip
# September 27, 2005 4:22 AM

David Gainer said:

Hi Boris - I have not seen that link, but we have definitely improved headers and footers in a number of ways. More on that when I talk about all our printing improvements.
# September 27, 2005 11:30 AM

simon murphy said:

David
Thanks for taking the time to reply to all our comments, I appreciate it.
cheers
Simon
# September 27, 2005 1:27 PM

Michelle said:

Will Excel 12 updates address the 1024 character limit for text?
# September 27, 2005 4:13 PM

David Gainer said:

Michelle - yes. See next post for complete list of limits we have changed.
# September 28, 2005 2:51 AM

Russell Proctor said:

Great first article,

Looking forward to finding out a lot more.

This is going to be a great blog which a lot of people are going to find really useful. I will have to include a link on my website.

Russell
# September 28, 2005 11:17 AM

SuperSean said:

What new visualization tools does Excel 12 have? Many of my clients use expensive 3rd party tools to provide a graphical representation of their Excel data. It would be great to have this functionality avaialble at every customer site that uses Excel (So I do not have to manual build these visual aids in ppt)!
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