Microsoft Excel

<<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... :-)

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

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

Thank you!


Q. Will the number of unique elements in a pivot table expand as well?

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

Hope to get even more useful info here.

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.

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

Just out of interest: why 16,384? At least it's a power of 2 (2^14), I suppose!

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

Greats!!

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

-Marcos Martins

Over 1 million rows! WOW! That's the best news I've heard all week about anything.

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

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.

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????

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?

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

Regards
Sudar

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"

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

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.

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

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.

Thank you

We need the facility to place more length of string in a Cell

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.

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

http://bygsoftware.com/haf/

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

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.

David
Thanks for taking the time to reply to all our comments, I appreciate it.
cheers
Simon

Will Excel 12 updates address the 1024 character limit for text?

Michelle - yes. See next post for complete list of limits we have changed.

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

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)!

In the past few months, I have written a couple of articles (big grid, multi-threaded calculation) that...

PingBack from http://www.money501.com/20060511524/over-one-hundred-page-layouts-one-css-file-yui-to-the-rescue/

Over the next few days, I am on a ridiculously over-scheduled training course, so I will not be producing...

To this point in the blog, I've covered most of the new features that we've added to Excel 2007, but...

Just over a year ago, I started this blog with the goal of documenting the new features in Excel 2007

PingBack from http://biowhat.com/2007/01/14/getting-the-transpose-of-a-csv/

PingBack from http://www.asap-utilities.com/blog/index.php/2005/09/23/official-excel-12-blog-more-rows-and-columns-in-excel-12/

PingBack from http://webequipo.com/vinceguthrie/2008/08/06/in-microsoft-excel-how-do-i-get-a-text-to-stand-for-a-numerical-value/

PingBack from http://www.keyongtech.com/840104-is-there-anyway-to-add

PingBack from http://woodtvstand.info/story.php?id=3867

PingBack from http://insomniacuresite.info/story.php?id=6479

PingBack from http://debtsolutionsnow.info/story.php?id=6521