Welcome to MSDN Blogs Sign in | Join | Help

Suggestions Please

Over the next few days, I am on a ridiculously over-scheduled training course, so I will not be producing any new content until sometime mid next week (and probably not answering comments or emails until then too).  In the meantime, I wanted to ask you what you would like to see covered in this blog over the next few months. 

Way back when I started this last September, I wrote “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.” 

I am have covered the bulk of Excel 2007’s new feature set, so I thought it would be an appropriate time to step back and see what else you would like to hear about.  What questions would you like answered?  What would you like covered in more detail?

For your reference, below is my rough list of things that I still plan to write about (no promises I will cover things in the order below, though).  Please take a look, and then let me know about anything else you would like to see.  You can either send me an email or post a comment – your choice.  Thanks for the help, and see you next week.

  • A walk-though of the major tabs as they appear in the public beta
  • The Developer tab
  • The Add-Ins tab
  • The deprecated feature list
  • The Trust Centre
  • A new programmable task pane
  • Managed (i.e. .NET) add-ins
  • The PIAs (primary interop assemblies)
  • A bit more on structured references (in places like refedit controls)
  • Templates in the box
  • Templates on Office Online
  • Your favourite feature most people never knew existed (audience participation night)
  • Server parameters – setting them up and using them
  • The Office Web Components
  • A walkthrough of all Excel 2007’s new file formats
  • Excel and grid computing
  • Compatibility Mode
  • Programming for backwards compatibility
  • Cross-application scenarios
  • The UI for the add-ins that ship with Excel
  • How to get dependency chain information from our XML file format
  • More on Quicklaunch
  • Calculation performance testing results
  • More on performance tuning
  • A few more interesting Excel Services developer examples
  • A few whitepapers we are writing
Published Wednesday, June 07, 2006 11:50 PM by David Gainer

Comments

# re: Suggestions Please

Thursday, June 08, 2006 3:54 AM by XL-Dennis
David,

Looks OK to me, especially the OWC-part.

However, I would like to address the following aspects:

# Using third-part ActiveX controls in Excel

# The requirements to use Excel Services

# The security aspect for add-ins

# The main reason(s) for creating managed add-ins, except for the rich features .NET offers.

# How to use classic UI.

Remark: I may have missed some blogposts that cover one or more of the above aspects.

Kind regards,
Dennis

# re: Suggestions Please

Thursday, June 08, 2006 6:04 AM by Mateusz Kierepka
Managed (i.e. .NET) add-ins

# re: Suggestions Please

Thursday, June 08, 2006 7:20 AM by Micke Hovmöller
I'd like to see you run through examples of actual problems people have and how to solve them properly.

A perfect example is the charts from The Economist from a few days back.

Real world examples almost always give some insights into aspects you had never thought about.

# re: Suggestions Please

Thursday, June 08, 2006 8:40 AM by Francis
I would like a discussion of Excel's statistical features.

Integration of the Analysis ToolPak is great. However, but inclusion of a Statistics ToolPak would be even better (with exploratory/descriptive statistics, e.g. tests of normality, multivariate and partial correlations, etc.)

Excel has the capacity to be a powerful analytical tool, especially with the new column and row limits. Unfortunately, its shortage of statistical functions means I need to use SPSS (buggy, unwieldy, and expensive) for anything more complicated than means and standard deviations.

P.S. It took me eons to discover ALT+ENTER (new line) and CTRL+ALT+ENTER (array formula) in Excel. Perhaps these shortcuts should appear on screen when users are entering long strings and array functions, respectively?

# re: Suggestions Please

Thursday, June 08, 2006 9:16 AM by Colin Banfield
Hi Francis,

Out of curiosity, have you tried any of the available statistical add-in packages for Excel?  If none of these packages can meet your needs, it's unlikely that we'll see statistical features in Excel that exceed the capabilities of these specialized add-ins.

# re: Suggestions Please

Thursday, June 08, 2006 9:40 AM by Phillip W. Lundeen
Your list looks great, but I would like to see the following moved up in the list
* Compatibility Mode
* Programming for backwards compatibility

Also is there some way to easily find a cross-reference from the Excel XP UI to the Excel 2007 UI?

I am hoping that the expanded available rows will make my job easier as a MIS Credit Analyst as I work with a lot a data that I now have to breakdown into various workbooks to produce the various reports for management.

What happens if I use Excel 12 and bring in a 150,000 item query and then give the workbook to some that has Excel XP?  I presume that they will not be able to access it or will end up with corrupted data.

I have really appreciated your blog and hope you will continue giving meaningful and helpful information.

# re: Suggestions Please

Thursday, June 08, 2006 11:36 AM by Air_Cooled_Nut
Everything Phillip said times two!

# re: Suggestions Please

Thursday, June 08, 2006 11:50 AM by Keith Bertelsen
I hear Word has a new equation editor thing. Is that ported to Excel, also? I find often that in my spreadsheets for Physics and Chemistry classes that I want to label a column with the mathematical formula that I'm calculating in that column (as I like doing intermediate steps, and not all of them have names), but I'm stuck with putting it in ASCII instead of fanciness. So is the equation editor thing ported, and if not, are there any plans to do so?

# re: Suggestions Please

Thursday, June 08, 2006 12:51 PM by John
Phillip,
There's an interactive command refference from 2003 to 2007  for excel at: http://officebeta.iponet.net/en-us/help/HA101491511033.aspx
Word at:
http://officebeta.iponet.net/en-us/help/HA100744321033.aspx
and powerpoint at:
http://officebeta.iponet.net/en-us/help/HA101490761033.aspx

# re: Suggestions Please

Thursday, June 08, 2006 7:05 PM by Anonymous
Here's my preference and rank:
- A new programmable task pane
- Programming for backwards compatibility
- The Add-Ins tab
- The UI for the add-ins that ship with Excel
- Managed (i.e. .NET) add-ins
- The PIAs (primary interop assemblies)
- A bit more on structured references (in places like refedit controls)
- Cross-application scenarios

# re: Suggestions Please

Friday, June 09, 2006 6:01 AM by Martin
I'd like to see a post on what the future plans are in regards to VBA and Query as I don't see any changes in the VBA editor and Query in the beta.

# re: Suggestions Please

Friday, June 09, 2006 10:37 AM by Randy
I would like to see if there has been any programming built in to allow for better integration with other Office products, such as exports from Project or Access.  I have had trouble with format changes, etc that should be able to be fixed with proper programming/conversion capabilities.

Also, I would love to see a section of the MS site for Excel (along side the templates) for users to share templates or spreadsheets they have created for a specific purpose.  Having a link to suggest a template doesn't do any good if the template never gets created.  Let the users share and share alike...

# re: Suggestions Please

Friday, June 09, 2006 4:22 PM by BradC
Transition-related issues seem important to me:

- The deprecated feature list
- Compatibility Mode
- Programming for backwards compatibility

Also looks interesting from your list:
- Your favourite feature most people never knew existed (audience participation night)
- A walkthrough of all Excel 2007’s new file formats (All? Is there more than xlsx?)
- Excel and grid computing

# re: Suggestions Please

Saturday, June 10, 2006 9:20 AM by Sherry
Here is my list.  Number one on my list would have to be:

~ A new programmable task pane

And then the others in the order of importance are:

~ The Add-Ins tab
~ Your favourite feature most people never knew existed (audience participation night)
~ The Developer tab
~ The deprecated feature list
~ The UI for the add-ins that ship with Excel
More on Quicklaunch
~ Managed (i.e. .NET) add-ins
~ Calculation performance testing results
~ The Office Web Components

# re: Suggestions Please

Monday, June 12, 2006 4:22 AM by John Greenan
A really simple thing - can the documentation show the complete list of command line switches in one place - in Excel 2002 I cannot see the /automation switch listed in the documentation anywhere, yet I use it on most days.

Also, what about a white paper or discussion about what is the preferred way to go for writing code to link into Excel - .xla, .xll, COM Addin or ???  


# re: Suggestions Please

Monday, June 12, 2006 4:04 PM by Mark Chapman
I'd like to hear what bugs have been fixed in Excel 2007. It's difficult to commit to switching to the upgrade without knowing that the problems I have found and reported have been fixed.

# re: Suggestions Please

Tuesday, June 13, 2006 2:38 PM by XL-Dennis
Hi John,

If You ask MSFT then the only answer will be:

Managed COM add-in developed with C# (or at least VB.NET) where Ýou need do understand what shimming is. OK, you need also to realize that at present there exist no Shim wizard for C# 2005 (although it has been advertised it for some time now).

However, from a practical experience the best solutions would be the already existing once:

XLA developed by Excel (although You need to carefully investigate what is backward compatible or not)

XLL developed with C/C++ (for advanced and more powerful functions) and I hope Steve Dalton will update his book on the subject.

COM add-ins developed with classic VB.

On a personal level I can't say that I see the logical in creating managed COM Add-ins for an unmanaged enviroment.

Kind regards,
Dennis

# re: Suggestions Please

Tuesday, June 13, 2006 4:02 PM by XL-Dennis
Sherry,

Stephen Bullen has developed an ActiveX control that host a VBA Userform. This control extend the Office  CustomTaskpane object. The control is still under beta and hopefully it will be available when Excel 2007 hit the market.

I have had the pleasure to test it and it works excellent. I've made some solutions where I've added built-in controls to it, populate the controls with data from a SQL Server 2005 db.

Based on the user's selection data is then retrieved and added to the target sheet.

The control offer a flexible alternative to the present task pane and make it easier to work with data then the present IBF offer (Let see what PerformancePoint Server 2007 will be offering later this year).

Kind regards,
Dennis

# re: Suggestions Please

Wednesday, June 14, 2006 4:40 AM by John Greenan
To Dennis Wallentin - I've worked with and/or written all of the above.

By shim you mean a PIA for the .net code to interoperate with COM don't you?  That's generally trivial.

# re: Suggestions Please

Wednesday, June 14, 2006 9:31 AM by XL-Dennis
John,

Take a look at the following article which gives You the answer to Your speculations:

Isolating Office Extensions with the COM Shim Wizard
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dno2k3ta/html/ODC_Office_COM_Shim_Wizards.asp

I leave it up to You to decide weather it trivial or not.

Kind regards,
Dennis

# re: Suggestions Please

Wednesday, June 14, 2006 12:42 PM by Francis
I would also like to hear about whether changes are being made to MS Query. Will its functionality be more directly integrated into Excel?

I need Excel's formulas/functions and 64k column limit but would like Access' ease-of-use and power in creating queries.

# re: Suggestions Please

Wednesday, June 14, 2006 3:02 PM by Colin Banfield
<<I would also like to hear about whether changes are being made to MS Query. Will its functionality be more directly integrated into Excel?

I need Excel's formulas/functions and 64k column limit but would like Access' ease-of-use and power in creating queries. <<

Francis, I'm with you on this but there are no changes to MS Query in Excel 2007.

# re: Suggestions Please

Wednesday, June 14, 2006 8:52 PM by Jean Martineau
Pivot table, Chart and the new Table concept are powerful ways to manipulate/organize data. I am interesting to hear about other new concepts that user would like to have or new concepts that Excel team have studied. For example, what about Animation or Creating a function from a pre-existing Excel formula.
New Comments to this post are disabled
 
Page view tracker