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October 2005 - Posts

Friday, October 28, 2005 10:25 PM

Tables Part 3: Using Formulas with Tables

One of our goals with tables was to create a set of features that reduce the overall maintenance required to keep a spreadsheet functioning well over time. This involves making spreadsheets less prone to error, as well as making them more understandable
Posted by David Gainer | 38 Comments
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Thursday, October 27, 2005 10:42 AM

Tables Part 2: Stickiness, Structured Selection, And More

One of the key benefits of tables is how other features in Excel 12 behave more predictably and more like you would expect when a table is present. This is made possible by the fact that Excel knows exactly where the table starts and ends, where the header
Posted by David Gainer | 22 Comments
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Tuesday, October 25, 2005 3:56 PM

Tables Part 1: Working With Tables Of Data

For the next few posts, I’d like to spend some time explaining the work we’ve done in Excel 12 to improve the experience of working with tabular data in Excel. One thing that we see pretty much every Excel user doing with some frequency is working with
Posted by David Gainer | 29 Comments
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Monday, October 24, 2005 5:53 PM

Business Intelligence

Some of you may have seen earlier today that Microsoft announced an investment in Business Intelligence across the Microsoft Office System with Excel 12 at the hub. You can watch the presentation and demo here . I have talked already about some of the
Posted by David Gainer | 10 Comments
Monday, October 24, 2005 5:49 PM

Usability Studies

In a few of my posts, I reference something termed “usability studies” as information that we considered when making a decision. Jensen Harris has recently put a post on usability studies up on his Office UI blog on this subject, so you may want to take
Posted by David Gainer | 3 Comments
Friday, October 21, 2005 4:38 PM

Formula building improvements Part 4: Defined Names

Defined names are a very useful tool for authoring formulas. Defined names allow users to name cell ranges, formulas, and values and refer to those names in their formulas. Used in formulas, defined names make formulas easier to read and more robust.
Posted by David Gainer | 33 Comments
Thursday, October 20, 2005 2:28 PM

Formula editing improvements Part 3: new functions

In addition to improving the formula editing UI in Excel 12, the team has spent some time adding to Excel’s function library. Over the years, customers have found new ways to combine and leverage the functions in Excel to build all sorts of things, but
Posted by David Gainer | 23 Comments
Wednesday, October 19, 2005 2:59 PM

Formula editing improvements Part 2: Formula AutoComplete

Last post I covered improvements we made to a long-time fixture of the Excel UI - the formula bar. Today I’d like to introduce a feature that is brand new for Excel 12. The feature is called Formula AutoComplete, and it is designed to make users more
Posted by David Gainer | 32 Comments
Tuesday, October 18, 2005 3:31 PM

Meet the Excel 12 formula bar, or “don’t hijack my grid!”

I’d like to shift gears a bit and talk about the work we’ve done to improve the experience around building and editing formulas. For most customers, this is a core activity in their daily use of the product. In planning for this version of Excel, we took
Posted by David Gainer | 23 Comments
Friday, October 14, 2005 1:42 PM

Conditional formatting using VBA - some examples

Since I have had some comments and emails asking about how the new conditional formatting features could be accessed using VBA, I wanted to provide a few brief examples. One of the Excel team’s principles is that when we add new features, we make sure
Posted by David Gainer | 13 Comments
Thursday, October 13, 2005 12:04 AM

More about conditional formatting ...

Another goal that we had for conditional formatting was to address top customer requests, like more than three conditions, the ability to reorder conditions, and the ability to have more than one condition resolve true. Let’s take a look at some of the
Posted by David Gainer | 14 Comments
Wednesday, October 12, 2005 9:48 PM

Conditional formatting meets the ribbon

Now that I have reviewed much of the new conditional formatting functionality we have added in Excel 12, let’s review how we have made it easier to find and use these features. O ne of our objectives was to showcase the feature in a more prominent place
Posted by David Gainer | 14 Comments
Tuesday, October 11, 2005 11:11 AM

New conditional formatting "rules" ...

A few posts back when I summarized our goals for conditional formatting, I said that one of our goals was to make a greater number of scenarios possible without needing to write formulas. Let me briefly explain what I mean. Excel 2003 gives users two
Posted by David Gainer | 15 Comments
Sunday, October 09, 2005 9:46 PM

Wrapping up new visualizations – icon sets

The final visualization that we added to Excel 12 has the working title “icon sets”. As the name implies, this feature allows users to put icons in cells based on the values of the cell. These are in some ways similar to data bars and colour scales, so
Posted by David Gainer | 18 Comments
Thursday, October 06, 2005 11:45 AM

We now return to conditional formatting - what’s a colour scale?

The second new visualization that we have added to Excel 12 is something we are calling “colour scales” (again, that may change later when we finish official feature naming). It shares a lot with data bars as described in a previous post – it is a comparison
Posted by David Gainer | 22 Comments
Wednesday, October 05, 2005 10:54 PM

We interrupt conditional formatting for a brief message about undo/redo and PDF…

A few posts ago when I wrote an overview of everything we did in Excel 12, I said that the list wasn’t 100% complete. Undo/redo is an example of that. We did work to improve undo/redo this release, and since someone asked about it in the comments of a
Posted by David Gainer | 16 Comments
Tuesday, October 04, 2005 11:05 PM

Conditional Formatting – overview of what we did, and what’s a “data bar”?

Conditional Formatting is a feature that allows users to apply formatting to cell(s) automatically depending on the value of the cell or the value of a formula. This is a handy feature, making it easy to highlight certain values (“all test scores below
Posted by David Gainer | 29 Comments
 
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