The big picture ...

re: The big picture ...

XL-Dennis — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 02:19:13 GMT

"Made connecting to external data more straightforward and added connection management capabilities to the product"

Does this also include ADO.NET?

"Created a new class of functions that return data directly from SQL Server Analysis Services"

Will it also be backward compatible or only targeting SQL Server 2005?

Kind regards,
Dennis

re: The big picture ...

Rob van Gelder — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 02:39:05 GMT

David,

Great advancements so far. I'm excited to see it.

A few questions:

<features to speed up calculations on modern hardware>
Does this mean that the calculation engine will support multiple CPUs?

With the new Conditional Formatting enhancements, will it be possible to configure a Conditional Number Format?
eg. eg when true #,##0.0, when false 0.0000 ?

Could you please reveal some of the new function names available?
Will there be any reverse lookup functions along the lines of the post:
http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.excel.worksheet.functions/msg/31684311d468a900

re: The big picture ...

Pete Wall — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 02:44:31 GMT

The bigger picture again - the future of Excel versus databases. The new Excel will be able to handle much larger amounts of data than currently.

I can imagine some simple improvements to pivot tables - formatting. But, for me, the current functionality of Excel needs little improvement. I can envisage more database-type functionality within Excel - such as a report similar to from a database. And evolutionary upgrades to the sort of capability exposed in MS Query.

My thoughts are that the software will be enormously powerful and most of that capability will be underutilised. This leads me to think that more focus would be valuable on improving the 'smartness' of the application to help users. And, I guess that is what is happening?

It seems to be less the software's functionality that needs improvement but the skills/'smartness' of users.

best regards,
Pete

re: The big picture ...

Colin Banfield — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 04:11:57 GMT

David, it's great to read about all the new features coming. Not since Excel 97 have we seen such an effort. Thanks! Are there any improvements to analysis features such as Scenario Manager, Solver, Goal Seek or Data Input Tables? Any new what-if features? Also, will VBA inherit any VB.NET characteristics?

Regards,
Colin

re: The big picture ...

Jim Rech — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 15:36:27 GMT

Exciting stuff, David.

Jim
Excel MVP
(not at summit)

re: The big picture ...

David Gainer — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 22:43:05 GMT

XL-Dennis – We have not done anything specific to ADO.NET in Excel 12, but using Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office you can databind a named range to a DataSet, DataTable, DataView, or anything that implements IList, IListSource, BindingList etc. This VSTO 2005 tool support is based on standard VS tools for databinding. That means, at design-time (with a few button clicks) you can very easily databind a named range or list to a database/table(s), stored procedure, web service, or any arbitrary business object that implements any of the specified interfaces.

Also, the new functions that return data from SQL Server Analysis Services will also work with SQL AS 2000.

Rob – yes, we will support multiple CPUs. More in a later post. Also, starting next week I will write several articles on conditional formatting, so I will try and answer questions there. I will have a post on new functions in the not-too-distant future too. Thanks for the interest!

Pete – One of the key reasons we are doing user interface work this release is to make it easier for people to find and use the features and commands they need to get the results they want. There is an overview here. http://www.microsoft.com/office/preview/uioverview.mspx Our hope is that this leads to much greater feature use.

Colin – No changes to S Manager, Goal Seek, Solver, or Data Tables this time out.

re: The big picture ...

Harlan Grove — Sat, 01 Oct 2005 00:14:47 GMT

Rob van Gelder...
...
><features to speed up calculations on modern >hardware>
>Does this mean that the calculation engine >will support multiple CPUs?
...

Also, does it mean fully using hardware floating point units? Clearly Excel's MOD function doesn't since

MOD(2^30,3)

returns a #NUM! error even though that particular calculation is well within IEEE bounds and Intel FPUs' have no trouble with it.

>Could you please reveal some of the new >function names available?
...

It'd be nice to see what the new functions are. Certainly there's room for improvement in the text handling functions, but Excel isn't really meant for text processing.

Of all the things that could be added, the two that would be the most useful would be adding built-in regular expression support to Excel (just like in OpenOffice) and making 3D references part of Excel's object model so they could be passed to VBA functions. The former would make a LOT of the long & complex text formulas offerred in the newsgroups unnecessary, and the latter would allow 3D references to udfs [note that the NPV function *already* handles 3D references in 2nd and subsequent args, and it's order-dependent, so there should already be an iterator for 3D references that could be used in For Each loops].

re: The big picture ...

Colin Banfield — Mon, 03 Oct 2005 19:01:32 GMT

>Colin No changes to S Manager, Goal Seek, Solver, or Data Tables this time out. <

Hmmm, does this mean that its too late to ask the development team to remove some annoying restrictions in Scenario Manager? The major annoyances include 1) changing cells and result cells for the Scenario Summary report must be on the same worksheet. When SM was an addin in Excel 4, this restriction didn't exist; 2) changing cells limited to only 32; 3) Excel decides how the report will be formatted (for the worksheet summary or he PivotTable summary). The user should be able to determine the report format. Furthermore, it should be possible to create links so that changes to values of the changing & result cells are reflected in the formatted summary report. If it's too late to do anything about the foregoing in this release, could you make a note for Excel 13? Pretty please? :-)

Oh, BTW, are we still stuck with only 16 levels of undo?

Colin

re: The big picture ...

Rob van Gelder — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 00:44:44 GMT

A nice feature that would be fairly quick to build.

Currently, I dont know how to submit to Microsoft a feature request.

In the Help menu, "Suggest a feature"
or "Wishlist"?

Thanks,
Rob

re: The big picture ...

Mike Woodhouse — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 12:28:10 GMT

This is shaping up to be the first seriously compelling version of Excel since 97. It'll probably wear off while we wait (<grin>) but I'm seeing enough to make me plan for an immediate upgrade, rather than "when I get round to it" as in the previous 3 or 4 releases...

Cool. Very cool. Of course it'll be about a decade for any of my likely workplaces consider rolling it out because it'll be new, different and therefore scary.

pivot table enhancements

mm — Tue, 04 Oct 2005 19:33:39 GMT

Regarding the enhancements associated with SQL Server, what is the nature of the connectivity? Will it work will other databases? Many more people use Excel with other databases than use Excel with SQL Server.

re: The big picture ...

Jason — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 01:47:05 GMT

Great news! In particular, I'm excited about the conditional formatting and charting enhancements!

Two requests (and like Colin, I completely understand if Excel 12 is long since closed to changes):

1) Variable width column charts. It's possible to fake these with the area- and stacked-area- charts, but it's really painful to make them that way.

2) Weighted linear regression formulae. I can make a bubble chart already, with (x, y, size) data points. I can add a trendline to that chart, but the trendline's based solely on the (x,y) points - it pays no attention to size. Conceptually, the next step would be a weighted linear regression, where each data point's repeated (size) times in the summations. [I tried doing this by hand - not sure if it's computationally prohibitive or if it's easy to optimize]

Thanks!

re: The big picture ...

Brooks Talley — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 04:35:34 GMT

Any chance of offering a TSQL-like query language for looking up values? I usually spend far too long messing with VLOOKUP when a simple "select [column_a] from [range] where [column_b]=[value]" would be infinitely easier.

re: The big picture ...

David Gainer — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 08:32:19 GMT

Greetings,

Rob – Details when I get to those posts, I promise. Thanks for the feedback on functions & 3-D referencing. Also, feature requests can be sent to xlwish@microsoft.com, or you can just put them in comments to this blog.

Colin – Thanks for the feedback on Scenario Manager. I will cover undo in a later post, but the short answer is no, you will not be limited to 16.

mm – The connectivity enhancements will work with any sort of connection – OLEDB, ODBC, etc. – so they will not be limited to SQL Server.

Jason – Thanks for the feedback.

Brooks – Thanks for the feedback. While we have not done exactly that, we have done some referencing work that may help a lot. More in a few weeks.

re: The big picture ...

Jon — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 15:55:08 GMT

Good morning, found this via a link @ Arstechnica.

I am certainly no expert when it comes to Excel, but I was trying to create a graph with a broken Y axis the other day. After searching around the 'net I saw that there was not much chance of me figuring it out since it was quite a convoluted solution.

Any chance that will be incorporated into your changes for v12?

And thanks for the many other changes I have seen, mostly in regards to lifting some of the row limits. I can't wait for this to get qualified by our IT security... :)

Thanks!

re: The big picture ...

David Gainer — Thu, 06 Oct 2005 08:54:18 GMT

Jon - unfortunately, we did address that this release.

re: The big picture ...

Colin Banfield — Fri, 07 Oct 2005 21:54:33 GMT

Since this "big picture" topic is still active, I'd like to make a suggestion that should be fairly easy to implement: Add a "Workbook Navigation" task pane. The pane will display a hierarchical list of open workbooks and worksheets (file manager style). Within this task pane you can see all (or most) of the open workbooks and worksheets at a glance (and scroll down to those you can't see at a glance). More importantly, in the pane you should be able to click on a worksheet to make the worksheet active. Just think of the current difficulties of managing a single workbook with a sh**tload of worksheets. You can see only a few worksheets at a time (less as the sheet names become larger) and scrolling back and forth endlessly is annoyingly cumbersome (right clicking on the navigation buttons and selecting a sheet from the popup list is somewhat less cumbersome). The Workbook Navigation pane could be used for other tasks as well, such as naming of renaming worksheets, hiding sheets, colouring sheet tabs and so on. There might be other ways to use the navigation pane. For example, you might set it to display only worksheets with precedents to a cell formula being audited. Taken a step further, it might display paths to external links referenced in a formula etc.

Colin

re: The big picture ...

Bruce — Tue, 11 Oct 2005 18:00:16 GMT

Could you please finally fully support dates prior to 1900?? They are supported in Access and you can manipulate values prior to 1900 - they are just negative. It is the formating and date functions that are not working. Thanks

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