# 1.1 Million Rows - A Discussion About Excel 12



## MrExcel

There have been four instances where Microsoft has shown Office 12 to the public.  Some high-level customers went out to Redmond in August. They showed it at the Professional Developers Conference in September. They showed it at the Publishers Summit in late September, and then again at the MVP Summit in late September.  To get in, you had to sign an NDA saying that you wouldn't discuss what you saw. However, some facts about Office 12 have been made public on various Microsoft websites, so I feel pretty safe in talking about these items. (After I wrote this, I went back and noted the public source where someone from Microsoft talked about the feature to make sure I am not treading anywhere that I shouldn't).

1) This is the most substantial new release of Excel since '95 or '97. (Source: my opinion).

2) The grid is expanding to 2^20 rows and 10,000+ columns. The final column is column XFD. The final row is around 1.1 million. (Source: Dave Gainer Weblog)

3) Charting has been completely rewritten. There are not new chart types, but the look and feel of the charts is light-years ahead of the current charts. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video on Channel 9)

4) You can now natively create PDF files from all Office applications. (Source: Steve Sinofsky released us from NDA for this one fact and said we could tell about this)

5) Pivot Tables and conditional formatting have been made easier. Conditional Formatting is incredibly powerful now - you can easily create visual views of your data. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video).  I *love* the Data Bar view as shown here in Dave Gainer's Blog

6) Keyboard-centric people will love that every single option available in the program will now be keyboard accessible. Not half, not most , but every single option.  I love the keyboard, I love memorizing keyboard shortcuts for the common things (I even think, Alt-EIJ when I need to edit-fill-justify. It is hard for me not to say, "just Alt-EIJ that range").  And yes - there is a classic mode for people who know the old shortcuts. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

7) Mouse-centric people will love that a new floating toolbar appears with the stuff usually in the right-click menu.  It is the same sort of semi-transparent thing that Outlook 2003 shows when a new e-mail arrives. If you move the mouse towards the toolbar, it becomes solid, otherwise it fades away.  I can see that this will be a huge timesaver - all of the good options just a few pixels from the current cell. (Julie Larsen Green Video)

8) They have completely re-thought menus and toolbars.  Word 1.0 offered 20 commands. Excel 2003 has 350 commands. There is no way to effectively layer 350 commands on 9 menu options - people can not find what they are looking for.  The new user interface is called "The Ribbon". It is context-sensitive like the current right-click menus. Instead of tiny toolbar icons, it has big buttons and words. The most powerful things are very evident in The Ribbon.  For a lot of people blogging about the release, they all seem to have heartburn that there is not a "classic" view that will bring back the old menu system.  I initially thought this was insane. However, after seeing it first-hand for a couple of days, I really think that this is a vast improvement.  I think this is a small hurdle, it will annoy me for 2 days, but once I get past it, then I have the full power of 1.1 million rows and more power to analyze data with Excel. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

9) In the MVP Excel breakout session, they showed some other features that have not been shown elsewhere. There are some gems in here, just in case #2, #3, #4, and #5 weren't enough. As soon as Dave Gainer talks about them, I will bring them up.

My take... a lot of people are still using Excel 97 or Excel 2000 and this is fine because Microsoft had not added much new stuff since Excel 97. It made it great as an author, because a screen shot from Excel 2003 looked almost like the screen shot from Excel 97 - you could write about seven years of Office releases with one book.

However, I think that this version has so much good stuff - it will be very very compelling for people to upgrade.  I was talking with a casual Excel user last night, and just that day, he had been burned by the 65,536 row limit. Other people want more than 3 conditional formatting. It will be easier for regular people to find the powerful features that are currently buried. 

The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.

Anyway - I've started this post for us to discuss the changes. If you hear of a new feature, feel free to post about it here. 

Bill


----------



## TrippyTom

I just want to say I'm waiting for your book on Excel 12. 

And I'm completely excited about this new release, even though I know my workplace won't even think about getting it until years later.  I'm definitely going to buy it for home use.


----------



## litrelord

So far this all looks fantastic to me.  At last some real changes that I will actually use, not just because I can, but because they will make it easier for me.

I've heard so many rumours it's difficult to weed out the truth.  Made more difficult by the varying Microsoft press releases.  At one time Office 12 was only going to work with Longhorn.  Now they say XP as well.  Surely it will work with Win2k as well though as this must be what the core of it's target audience are using in a networked office environment?  Would like to hear more for certain on that one.

The only other concern I have is that if Microsoft keep on improving their products like this and adding functionality where does that leave me?  I'll no longer be the "excel answers guy" because there won't be any need for all my little macros and shortcuts   

And finally a release from 65536.  Mind you, it will take a few years before Office 12 is common enough that we can use all of them for spreadsheet going outside of the company.  I still have to save some reports as excel 95 before sending them out. 

Onwards and upwards!

Nick


----------



## Smitty

> The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.


Unfortunately, I don't see my company upgrading all office users anytime soon; heck, our sales reps just got PC's less than 2 years ago.  So I'll have to buy a laptop/system I can use at home with O12.

From a "Power User" point of view I see a lot of advantages to the upgrades mentioned, however, I see some huge potential for wb's bloated beyond recognition and more FUBAR'd then they can be now.  Especially for the majority of our users who have "bare bones" systems intended more for e-mail and on-line access to customer proofs than serious computing.  

The 64 IF levels scares the crap out me; learning to read "IF" will be as complicated as Mandarin Chinese for a Texan!  Fortunately, most of my users don't know anything about logic or how to express it verbally, let alone in a formula anyway.

I liken it a bit to driving in HellA: the smarter cars get, the dumber the drivers become.

It ought to be interesting, especially from an integration standpoint.  A note to our Finance Department(s): are you going to have to migrate away from 1-2-3? 

Smitty


----------



## Zack Barresse

Great post Bill.  

I must say, as for myself I am very, very excited about O12.  It sounds like Microsoft has done some fantastic things to it, and more importantly, they have listened to the users and given what was needed.  Better charting?  More Conditional Formats?  More rows and columns?  Heck yes!  I can't wait.

The one thing about all this that worries me is your last statement, as I share Smitty's concern.  I feel safe in assuming that you will be able to save to prior versions of Excel, which of course would be more widely used as not everybody will upgrade right away.

I think Microsoft got into a rut with their previous Office versions, from 95 to 2003.  They're all pretty much the same with (imo) two major exceptions, 1) the look/graphics are different/improved, and 2) more options were available in each subsequent version.  This is good because there were things you could do with Excel 2002 that you couldn't with Excel 97.  This made things easier from a workbook developer's point of view; more tools in the toolbox.

I think if Microsoft does an excellent job of marketing this new Office version, they will be able to see many more users migrate to it a lot quicker than they have seen in the past.  For me personally, I'm definitely going to have it.  I just couldn't pass it up.  Actually, I can't wait to code VBA with it.  

Thanks Bill, take care.


----------



## MrExcel

There is a file compatability mode. If you are using Excel 12, you can save your files in a format readable by Excel 97-2003. However, when you then open this file in Excel 12, you are forced into a backwards compatability mode where new features may not work.

I am not sure that I want to be limited to 3 conditional format levels just because I have to save the file in the old format for Joe down the hall who won't upgrade. You certainly will enjoy the new features more if everyone in the office has the new version.


----------



## XL-Dennis

> The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.



I fully agree and it's important that MSFT set up an attractive pricemodel for Office System 12 as well as single out the core business values that next version will add to the corporates.

In addition, it will also be of interest to learn what the hardware requirements will be. The new UI and the expanded capacity will surely demand more powerful computers then the present versions do and Windows Vista will be the first software that will give us a hint about it.

On a personal note I welcome this huge upgrade of Excel for many reasons but as we also know new possibilites solves many of today's issues and limitations but also create tomorrow's issues. 

Anyway, since it's more then a year (?) when Office 12 will be shipped there are some other softwares in the pipeline that will be of interest such as VS.NET/VSTO, SQL Server 2005 and Windows Vista and they may give us additional input in order to view all the news in Excel 12.


----------



## GorD

So, in ball park terms, how far away is this release likely to be, 3 months, 6 months, a year, 2 years or longer. Anyone any got any information or like to have an educated guess.


----------



## XL-Dennis

AFAIK, end of 2006.


----------



## just_jon

I'm wondering if, given today's economy, how many large corporations are going to be willing to update across the board in order to take advantage of O12's capabilities?


----------



## MrExcel

There have been four instances where Microsoft has shown Office 12 to the public.  Some high-level customers went out to Redmond in August. They showed it at the Professional Developers Conference in September. They showed it at the Publishers Summit in late September, and then again at the MVP Summit in late September.  To get in, you had to sign an NDA saying that you wouldn't discuss what you saw. However, some facts about Office 12 have been made public on various Microsoft websites, so I feel pretty safe in talking about these items. (After I wrote this, I went back and noted the public source where someone from Microsoft talked about the feature to make sure I am not treading anywhere that I shouldn't).

1) This is the most substantial new release of Excel since '95 or '97. (Source: my opinion).

2) The grid is expanding to 2^20 rows and 10,000+ columns. The final column is column XFD. The final row is around 1.1 million. (Source: Dave Gainer Weblog)

3) Charting has been completely rewritten. There are not new chart types, but the look and feel of the charts is light-years ahead of the current charts. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video on Channel 9)

4) You can now natively create PDF files from all Office applications. (Source: Steve Sinofsky released us from NDA for this one fact and said we could tell about this)

5) Pivot Tables and conditional formatting have been made easier. Conditional Formatting is incredibly powerful now - you can easily create visual views of your data. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video).  I *love* the Data Bar view as shown here in Dave Gainer's Blog

6) Keyboard-centric people will love that every single option available in the program will now be keyboard accessible. Not half, not most , but every single option.  I love the keyboard, I love memorizing keyboard shortcuts for the common things (I even think, Alt-EIJ when I need to edit-fill-justify. It is hard for me not to say, "just Alt-EIJ that range").  And yes - there is a classic mode for people who know the old shortcuts. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

7) Mouse-centric people will love that a new floating toolbar appears with the stuff usually in the right-click menu.  It is the same sort of semi-transparent thing that Outlook 2003 shows when a new e-mail arrives. If you move the mouse towards the toolbar, it becomes solid, otherwise it fades away.  I can see that this will be a huge timesaver - all of the good options just a few pixels from the current cell. (Julie Larsen Green Video)

8) They have completely re-thought menus and toolbars.  Word 1.0 offered 20 commands. Excel 2003 has 350 commands. There is no way to effectively layer 350 commands on 9 menu options - people can not find what they are looking for.  The new user interface is called "The Ribbon". It is context-sensitive like the current right-click menus. Instead of tiny toolbar icons, it has big buttons and words. The most powerful things are very evident in The Ribbon.  For a lot of people blogging about the release, they all seem to have heartburn that there is not a "classic" view that will bring back the old menu system.  I initially thought this was insane. However, after seeing it first-hand for a couple of days, I really think that this is a vast improvement.  I think this is a small hurdle, it will annoy me for 2 days, but once I get past it, then I have the full power of 1.1 million rows and more power to analyze data with Excel. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

9) In the MVP Excel breakout session, they showed some other features that have not been shown elsewhere. There are some gems in here, just in case #2, #3, #4, and #5 weren't enough. As soon as Dave Gainer talks about them, I will bring them up.

My take... a lot of people are still using Excel 97 or Excel 2000 and this is fine because Microsoft had not added much new stuff since Excel 97. It made it great as an author, because a screen shot from Excel 2003 looked almost like the screen shot from Excel 97 - you could write about seven years of Office releases with one book.

However, I think that this version has so much good stuff - it will be very very compelling for people to upgrade.  I was talking with a casual Excel user last night, and just that day, he had been burned by the 65,536 row limit. Other people want more than 3 conditional formatting. It will be easier for regular people to find the powerful features that are currently buried. 

The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.

Anyway - I've started this post for us to discuss the changes. If you hear of a new feature, feel free to post about it here. 

Bill


----------



## Sloveni4n

Looks great. MUST HAVE!! Thanks for the post.


----------



## pfarmer

just_jon said:
			
		

> I'm wondering if, given today's economy, how many large corporations are going to be willing to update across the board in order to take advantage of O12's capabilities?



A good question. IT recently upgraded my 6 gb hd with a 10gb hd, so I think I know a local answer to that question.

Perry


----------



## Smitty

> IT recently upgraded my 6 gb hd with a 10gb hd, so I think I know a local aswer to that question.


I didn't think they were that small anymore!  My IS Dept wants to upgrade me to a 150Gb from 75.

Smitty


----------



## pfarmer

pennysaver said:
			
		

> IT recently upgraded my 6 gb hd with a 10gb hd, so I think I know a local aswer to that question.
> 
> 
> 
> I didn't think they were that small anymore!  My IS Dept wants to upgrade me to a 150Gb from 75.
> 
> Smitty
Click to expand...


What I found funny is that it looked like a brand new drive.

Perry


----------



## gwkenny

just_jon said:
			
		

> I'm wondering if, given today's economy, how many large corporations are going to be willing to update across the board in order to take advantage of O12's capabilities?



I expect it would be par for the course.  Meaning zero to not very many at all unless they already have special relationships with Microsoft.

Even in good times large companies will balk at the cost of upgrading software.  Microsoft's price tag isn't a small chunk of change.

Given the expanded spreadsheet size and Microsoft's past history of effective memory management, this office version will almost definitely require more memory and maybe CPU speed than what will be on the average office PC in large organizations.

In my experience it's usually several years before large organizations rollout releases:

1)  Wait for Microsoft to iron out the major bugs that might (will) pop up
2)  After a couple of years have passed, the % of PC's in the organization that can physically run the release to be rolled is a lot higher (when compared to a few years before when the release to be rolled out was issued by the software developer) and fewer upgrades are needed.
3)  Takes awhile to test in-house applications for compatibility testing
4)  Takes awhile for in-house IT to demonstrate the value added of upgrading and then for management to buy into the argument to shell out the dough.

Consultants can make lots of money in steps 3 and 4 



			
				firefytr said:
			
		

> I think Microsoft got into a rut with their previous Office versions, from 95 to 2003. They're all pretty much the same with (imo) two major exceptions, 1) the look/graphics are different/improved, and 2) more options were available in each subsequent version.



I disagree.  I think there was a lot of change on the front end between 95 and Office 2000.

There was a ton of change on the back end.  Especially functionality.

Coding - Having coded from Wordbasic and VBA across the versions I noticed the huge increase in the object models as well as consolidation across the applications so the same object tends to behave the same (though this is far from perfect at the moment).

Administration - There's an incredible amount of change in remote monitering, installation, and maintainence of office installed on desktops for large organizations from versions 95 to 2003.  You can cut IT support headcount significantly between the two versions.

COMPETITION

Microsoft has a huge leg up as it can code from the start to have it's Office Applications work hand in hand with the operating system.

It would be interesting to see what inroads (if any) could the competition make.

Think it will also be interesting to see what the effect of enterprise software being easier to use and design have on large organizations.


----------



## hummelc

Just Jon - you got it!

I can not see my or any corporation to globally change Excel accross the whole company. The cost  is too high, unless MS will lower their licence fees considerably (which I doubt).

Corproations are cost sensitive adn again only a few power users will enjoy the new Excel, with the otehr being bought on-line over time or as needed. This could take 3 years at least. :wink:


----------



## Zack Barresse

I think it'll take a lot longer than 3 years.  Lots.  I'd venture a decade.

gwkenny: I agree with you.  Maybe I came across wrong.  My main point is that I think O12 will be so much more advanced beyond the current version than any of the previous versions have ever been.  Sure there have been advances, yes the Object Model has grown, along with the functions bank and dozens of other little features.  But this change is so much greater than anything we've ever seen.


----------



## Pearso

A question that i have about Excel12 is that will the VBA editor etc. change.  I've just started writing macros in Excel11 and i don't really want to start from scratch again.  I'm guessing due the limited release of information that i may have to wait and see what happens.


----------



## Zack Barresse

All your VBA has been said it will work in ver 12.  So if you write a macro in ver 11, it will work in 12.


----------



## pfarmer

Pearso said:
			
		

> A question that i have about Excel12 is that will the VBA editor etc. change.  I've just started writing macros in Excel11 and i don't really want to start from scratch again.  I'm guessing due the limited release of information that i may have to wait and see what happens.



What I would find interesting for business if it had a runtime engine, that is you could develop new applications with all of these great new features and have them run on machines that do not have Excel on them.

I would see companies paying a lot more for the application if they could run the results on machines without it.

Perry


----------



## MrExcel

There have been four instances where Microsoft has shown Office 12 to the public.  Some high-level customers went out to Redmond in August. They showed it at the Professional Developers Conference in September. They showed it at the Publishers Summit in late September, and then again at the MVP Summit in late September.  To get in, you had to sign an NDA saying that you wouldn't discuss what you saw. However, some facts about Office 12 have been made public on various Microsoft websites, so I feel pretty safe in talking about these items. (After I wrote this, I went back and noted the public source where someone from Microsoft talked about the feature to make sure I am not treading anywhere that I shouldn't).

1) This is the most substantial new release of Excel since '95 or '97. (Source: my opinion).

2) The grid is expanding to 2^20 rows and 10,000+ columns. The final column is column XFD. The final row is around 1.1 million. (Source: Dave Gainer Weblog)

3) Charting has been completely rewritten. There are not new chart types, but the look and feel of the charts is light-years ahead of the current charts. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video on Channel 9)

4) You can now natively create PDF files from all Office applications. (Source: Steve Sinofsky released us from NDA for this one fact and said we could tell about this)

5) Pivot Tables and conditional formatting have been made easier. Conditional Formatting is incredibly powerful now - you can easily create visual views of your data. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video).  I *love* the Data Bar view as shown here in Dave Gainer's Blog

6) Keyboard-centric people will love that every single option available in the program will now be keyboard accessible. Not half, not most , but every single option.  I love the keyboard, I love memorizing keyboard shortcuts for the common things (I even think, Alt-EIJ when I need to edit-fill-justify. It is hard for me not to say, "just Alt-EIJ that range").  And yes - there is a classic mode for people who know the old shortcuts. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

7) Mouse-centric people will love that a new floating toolbar appears with the stuff usually in the right-click menu.  It is the same sort of semi-transparent thing that Outlook 2003 shows when a new e-mail arrives. If you move the mouse towards the toolbar, it becomes solid, otherwise it fades away.  I can see that this will be a huge timesaver - all of the good options just a few pixels from the current cell. (Julie Larsen Green Video)

8) They have completely re-thought menus and toolbars.  Word 1.0 offered 20 commands. Excel 2003 has 350 commands. There is no way to effectively layer 350 commands on 9 menu options - people can not find what they are looking for.  The new user interface is called "The Ribbon". It is context-sensitive like the current right-click menus. Instead of tiny toolbar icons, it has big buttons and words. The most powerful things are very evident in The Ribbon.  For a lot of people blogging about the release, they all seem to have heartburn that there is not a "classic" view that will bring back the old menu system.  I initially thought this was insane. However, after seeing it first-hand for a couple of days, I really think that this is a vast improvement.  I think this is a small hurdle, it will annoy me for 2 days, but once I get past it, then I have the full power of 1.1 million rows and more power to analyze data with Excel. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

9) In the MVP Excel breakout session, they showed some other features that have not been shown elsewhere. There are some gems in here, just in case #2, #3, #4, and #5 weren't enough. As soon as Dave Gainer talks about them, I will bring them up.

My take... a lot of people are still using Excel 97 or Excel 2000 and this is fine because Microsoft had not added much new stuff since Excel 97. It made it great as an author, because a screen shot from Excel 2003 looked almost like the screen shot from Excel 97 - you could write about seven years of Office releases with one book.

However, I think that this version has so much good stuff - it will be very very compelling for people to upgrade.  I was talking with a casual Excel user last night, and just that day, he had been burned by the 65,536 row limit. Other people want more than 3 conditional formatting. It will be easier for regular people to find the powerful features that are currently buried. 

The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.

Anyway - I've started this post for us to discuss the changes. If you hear of a new feature, feel free to post about it here. 

Bill


----------



## litrelord

pfarmer said:
			
		

> Pearso said:
> 
> 
> 
> 
> A question that i have about Excel12 is that will the VBA editor etc. change.  I've just started writing macros in Excel11 and i don't really want to start from scratch again.  I'm guessing due the limited release of information that i may have to wait and see what happens.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> What I would find interesting for business if it had a runtime engine, that is you could develop new applications with all of these great new features and have them run on machines that do not have Excel on them.
> 
> I would see companies paying a lot more for the application if they could run the results on machines without it.
> 
> Perry
Click to expand...


Yep, on the way already I think.  Unless I read it wrong.  The next visual studio should allow you to do that.  



			
				KD Hallman General Manager Microsoft said:
			
		

> Now Visual Studio is going to open up that Excel spreadsheet, and the thing you're going to notice is look at this, this is Excel sitting with Visual Studio. This is not screen scraping, this is not a part of Excel. This is all of Excel sitting completely tightly integrated into Visual Studio.



Taken from here http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/speeches/2005/02-04OfficeDevCon.asp

Which is a transcript of a speech made by Bill gates at the Office System Developer Conference.

Sounds really good and well worth reading the transcript or watching the vid (or audio, whichever it is).  

Nick


----------



## Mr_Stability

*Corporates moving to O12*

Not the one I used to work for until I was 'Downsized'.  Last year they still had PII 133's and 266's running win95/O97 and were only "thinking about a company-wide rollout of Win2K when they could afford some 'newer' PCs"

What they'd make of the costs associated with a rollout of Vista (or even XP-Pro) capable pc's for O12 I hate to think (Heee Heee!)


----------



## nbrcrunch

What about the performance of such a large file? Already when I receive 1 to 3 meg files it takes forever to work with them.  Even working with them on more powerful systems (beefed up memory and large hard drives) it still has issues.

Has MS instituted any native compression in version12?  Has program's logic been optimized any better than prior versions?  Bells & whistles are nice and I'd love to have v12 but not at the expense of slower performance.


----------



## litrelord

That seems even more true when I see Microsoft pushing the xml file format so much.  I don't know whether things have improved at all but in office xp if I save a 1.5 meg file as an xml file it turns into nearly 8 meg.


----------



## Tazguy37

firefytr said:
			
		

> All your VBA has been said it will work in ver 12.  So if you write a macro in ver 11, it will work in 12.



I should hope so.  After all, XL2003 still supports GET.CELL


----------



## NateO

Hello,


			
				nbrcrunch said:
			
		

> What about the performance of such a large file? Already when I receive 1 to 3 meg files it takes forever to work with them.  Even working with them on more powerful systems (beefed up memory and large hard drives) it still has issues..


Excel has always had memory caps, probably to protect you from yourself:

http://www.decisionmodels.com/memlimitsc.htm

Although DDR RAM seems to really help...

In any case, these are going away with V. 12:



			
				David Gainer said:
			
		

> http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2005/9/26.aspx
> 
> Total amount of PC memory that Excel can use
> Old Limit: 1GB
> New Limit: Maximum allowed by Windows


And...



			
				MrExcel said:
			
		

> 4) You can now natively create PDF files from all Office applications. (Source: Steve Sinofsky released us from NDA for this one fact and said we could tell about this)


T'is a pity, I was hoping to ban PDF files from my machine and workplace. Introduce some functionality to perform a quality coercion of a PDF file to a Spreadsheet and I'll be a happy camper. I already receive far too many mission-critical data reports in a PDF format; it's a nightmare...


----------



## pfarmer

litrelord said:
			
		

> That seems even more true when I see Microsoft pushing the xml file format so much.  I don't know whether things have improved at all but in office xp if I save a 1.5 meg file as an xml file it turns into nearly 8 meg.



I find this to be a huge factor. When making an html report page recently the file size (using Excel saveas html) ended up being 1.2 megs. Using a  another routine which I then proceded to moderately modify yielded a file size of 7 k (and it also has a lot more bells and whistles to boot).

Perry


----------



## Smitty

> T'is a pity, I was hoping to ban PDF files from my machine and workplace. Introduce some functionality to perform a quality coercion of a PDF file to a Spreadsheet and I'll be a happy camper. I already receive far too many mission-critical data reports in a PDF format; it's a nightmare...


Ahh yes, the ubiquitous PDF...They work just great when you get one that has data that "needs to be analyzed immediately"...I hand my boss the trusty HP12c (that I know he can't use), and a red pen.   :wink:  

Smitty


----------



## alexaronson

Does anyone know if MSFT has done anything to make excel compact data better.  1.1 million rows is going to make a monster of spread sheet to email, place on a share sherver, just to open, and make mass formula changes.  

I have current files that are over 80 megs and my machine struggles at times with that.


----------



## Zack Barresse

Oh.  My.  Goodness.  80 MB?!?!?!  Ugh, I can't look.  eek!


----------



## MrExcel

There have been four instances where Microsoft has shown Office 12 to the public.  Some high-level customers went out to Redmond in August. They showed it at the Professional Developers Conference in September. They showed it at the Publishers Summit in late September, and then again at the MVP Summit in late September.  To get in, you had to sign an NDA saying that you wouldn't discuss what you saw. However, some facts about Office 12 have been made public on various Microsoft websites, so I feel pretty safe in talking about these items. (After I wrote this, I went back and noted the public source where someone from Microsoft talked about the feature to make sure I am not treading anywhere that I shouldn't).

1) This is the most substantial new release of Excel since '95 or '97. (Source: my opinion).

2) The grid is expanding to 2^20 rows and 10,000+ columns. The final column is column XFD. The final row is around 1.1 million. (Source: Dave Gainer Weblog)

3) Charting has been completely rewritten. There are not new chart types, but the look and feel of the charts is light-years ahead of the current charts. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video on Channel 9)

4) You can now natively create PDF files from all Office applications. (Source: Steve Sinofsky released us from NDA for this one fact and said we could tell about this)

5) Pivot Tables and conditional formatting have been made easier. Conditional Formatting is incredibly powerful now - you can easily create visual views of your data. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video).  I *love* the Data Bar view as shown here in Dave Gainer's Blog

6) Keyboard-centric people will love that every single option available in the program will now be keyboard accessible. Not half, not most , but every single option.  I love the keyboard, I love memorizing keyboard shortcuts for the common things (I even think, Alt-EIJ when I need to edit-fill-justify. It is hard for me not to say, "just Alt-EIJ that range").  And yes - there is a classic mode for people who know the old shortcuts. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

7) Mouse-centric people will love that a new floating toolbar appears with the stuff usually in the right-click menu.  It is the same sort of semi-transparent thing that Outlook 2003 shows when a new e-mail arrives. If you move the mouse towards the toolbar, it becomes solid, otherwise it fades away.  I can see that this will be a huge timesaver - all of the good options just a few pixels from the current cell. (Julie Larsen Green Video)

8) They have completely re-thought menus and toolbars.  Word 1.0 offered 20 commands. Excel 2003 has 350 commands. There is no way to effectively layer 350 commands on 9 menu options - people can not find what they are looking for.  The new user interface is called "The Ribbon". It is context-sensitive like the current right-click menus. Instead of tiny toolbar icons, it has big buttons and words. The most powerful things are very evident in The Ribbon.  For a lot of people blogging about the release, they all seem to have heartburn that there is not a "classic" view that will bring back the old menu system.  I initially thought this was insane. However, after seeing it first-hand for a couple of days, I really think that this is a vast improvement.  I think this is a small hurdle, it will annoy me for 2 days, but once I get past it, then I have the full power of 1.1 million rows and more power to analyze data with Excel. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

9) In the MVP Excel breakout session, they showed some other features that have not been shown elsewhere. There are some gems in here, just in case #2, #3, #4, and #5 weren't enough. As soon as Dave Gainer talks about them, I will bring them up.

My take... a lot of people are still using Excel 97 or Excel 2000 and this is fine because Microsoft had not added much new stuff since Excel 97. It made it great as an author, because a screen shot from Excel 2003 looked almost like the screen shot from Excel 97 - you could write about seven years of Office releases with one book.

However, I think that this version has so much good stuff - it will be very very compelling for people to upgrade.  I was talking with a casual Excel user last night, and just that day, he had been burned by the 65,536 row limit. Other people want more than 3 conditional formatting. It will be easier for regular people to find the powerful features that are currently buried. 

The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.

Anyway - I've started this post for us to discuss the changes. If you hear of a new feature, feel free to post about it here. 

Bill


----------



## Tazguy37

alexaronson said:
			
		

> I have current files that are over 80 megs and my machine struggles at times with that.



Have you tried shinking that file size at all?


----------



## mivar

*Excel 12*

1 million rows sound like insanity....of course if excel performs with calculations on a bit more than 65000 it would be good but with that kind of record count I would consider using OLAP technology

But then again I'm a BI consulent .... doh!!

But what have come to my attention with excel is the enhanced collaboration with the server section of microsoft. Search here 

http://microsoft.sitestream.com/PDC05/

for off322 and off323 to see videos regarding this matter.

So I'm looking forward to see what this brings along - up til now excel had some missing features regarding the support of the olap server tools - perhaps microsoft now will delilver the full package - the back bone and the front end.


----------



## Joe Was

I have been getting the MSDN News Letter and been doing the links about version 12. Like Bill pointed to the ribbon and no toolbar was the first thing that made me say "What." Most of what I have seen, only looks great. I can't wait!

Two things did scare me though:

1st: MS at first indicated that they were not supporting VB in the future and that one model of version 12 did not include VBA. With the uproar over that MS indicated that VB is here to stay for some time?

2nd: New things are being referred to as if we know about them or their use, that seem to be key to the new version. Like: Really scary Security additions, that will make coders jump through new hoops. And, data display tools, never seen before. So, I well wait until my copy to cross these bridges.

One of the things that I hoped would be address, that I have not seen details on, is the greater intergration of object property tables with VBA. Or, greater VBA reference to the Windows environment [Wscript & Shell help in VBA help] and application development tools, like an application packager?


----------



## madwab

*upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company*



> The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.



Actually I disagree. There are of course many advantages in having everyone on the same version, but it's far from necessary. As a data analyst I regularly handle very large amounts of data, but the finished reports my customers see, usually in Excel, have never yet come close to current Excel limitations.

In fact I have a copy of Quattro Pro installed for the occasions that I need to import and filter over 65k rows. Once that's done I finish the job in Excel.



> 1 million rows sound like insanity....of course if excel performs with calculations on a bit more than 65000 it would be good but with that kind of record count I would consider using OLAP technology



Same answer, really - I have to export large reports to one of a limited range of formats, currently .rtf, .doc, .pdf or .xls. I can't do much with .doc or .pdf; .xls filtered through Quattro is a simple solution, tho' I'm now looking to VB.Net, ADO/ODBC, SQL etc.

I agree that currently a 1m sheet would be a questionable design. However when I first used Excel, the idea of serious video editing on a home PC was laughable, yet now we take it for granted. Technology is still advancing rapidly, and the idea of using Excel for _some_ kinds of large semi-database type work no longer seems that daft, it being so much more easy to learn than Access or SQL.


----------



## keepitfrozen

While i'm hardly as technical as you guys are just the look of the menus excites me but what about backward compatability with previous version of excel. Our office uses 2000 still, so what would happen if i had a sheet that went past the 65536 mark and i sent it to a co-worker, would he/she be unable to view the file?

Mark


----------



## madwab

*They would not*

...at least, they would certainly not be able to see all of the data. I believe v12 will intruce a new save format, in which case if you save in the default format your colleasgues won't be able to open the file. Even if they can, their version of Excel can't and won't import data beyond 65k rows. If you save in an earlier format the same applies, but I would hope that Excel will simply refuse to save it anyway, or at least warn you that the whole file won't open in earlier versions.

But you don't really have a requirement to send colleagues spreadsheets with that much data very often, do you? The more likely scenario is that an anallyst will need access to the full dataset, but will distribute summaries to colleagues; practicalities such as the size of emails, performance and macro security issues mean that it's already rarely appropriate to distribute the full data set, and those issues will get worse with v12. Few people will thank you for a 20MB email that takes 5 minutes to open and many seconds to respond to every change...

Even if you do need to send lots of data, v12 still helps: you can use it to move that data into multiple tabs, each with the maximum number of rows or less, then save in an earlier version - not ideal, but workable. In earlier versions of Excel you couldn't even do that, because the source data was truncated before it got into Excel.


----------



## SydneyGeek

Dave Gainer's log talks about a setup called Excel Server -- basically, using Sharepoint to make workbooks available over a browser. I'm not sure how full the feature set will be. I guess the other problem is Sharepoint. MS is pushing it pretty hard, but do you know any / many businesses that use it at all?

Denis


----------



## PrinceNeptune

The mere mention of the phrase "excel server" makes my stomach turn.  The problem doesn't lie in the server itself, but how people will use them (mainly incorrectly).

I went to a company to do some analyst work who claimed to have an access database all created.  The day I got there, it was one giant spreadsheet of information with no primary key.  There were duplicate values in just about every column.  So my job became sorting through 30,000 entries to make a useable database (meaning that from day 1 they have entered this stuff continously not knowing what they were doing).

I can only imagine how people will use a MS spreadsheet that has the capability of 1 million rows.  Though I think it is insanely impractical and will take years before that number proves to be useful.

Appreciate all the updates you guys have given, this is a very interesting project I like to follow.


----------



## just_jon

The puching of thin client setups may well make the point that everyone has to upgrade at once a moot point.

My office is testing the thing out, and I can see he day in the very near future where the only people w/ big boxes will be dinasaurs like _moi_ ...


----------



## doco

I suppose for a lot of large organizations (like ours), when XL12 comes out will be of little matter.  Most of the organization (State Government) just upgraded to 2003 from 97!  So my guess is it will be late 2015 before the next upgrade


----------



## MrExcel

There have been four instances where Microsoft has shown Office 12 to the public.  Some high-level customers went out to Redmond in August. They showed it at the Professional Developers Conference in September. They showed it at the Publishers Summit in late September, and then again at the MVP Summit in late September.  To get in, you had to sign an NDA saying that you wouldn't discuss what you saw. However, some facts about Office 12 have been made public on various Microsoft websites, so I feel pretty safe in talking about these items. (After I wrote this, I went back and noted the public source where someone from Microsoft talked about the feature to make sure I am not treading anywhere that I shouldn't).

1) This is the most substantial new release of Excel since '95 or '97. (Source: my opinion).

2) The grid is expanding to 2^20 rows and 10,000+ columns. The final column is column XFD. The final row is around 1.1 million. (Source: Dave Gainer Weblog)

3) Charting has been completely rewritten. There are not new chart types, but the look and feel of the charts is light-years ahead of the current charts. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video on Channel 9)

4) You can now natively create PDF files from all Office applications. (Source: Steve Sinofsky released us from NDA for this one fact and said we could tell about this)

5) Pivot Tables and conditional formatting have been made easier. Conditional Formatting is incredibly powerful now - you can easily create visual views of your data. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video).  I *love* the Data Bar view as shown here in Dave Gainer's Blog

6) Keyboard-centric people will love that every single option available in the program will now be keyboard accessible. Not half, not most , but every single option.  I love the keyboard, I love memorizing keyboard shortcuts for the common things (I even think, Alt-EIJ when I need to edit-fill-justify. It is hard for me not to say, "just Alt-EIJ that range").  And yes - there is a classic mode for people who know the old shortcuts. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

7) Mouse-centric people will love that a new floating toolbar appears with the stuff usually in the right-click menu.  It is the same sort of semi-transparent thing that Outlook 2003 shows when a new e-mail arrives. If you move the mouse towards the toolbar, it becomes solid, otherwise it fades away.  I can see that this will be a huge timesaver - all of the good options just a few pixels from the current cell. (Julie Larsen Green Video)

8) They have completely re-thought menus and toolbars.  Word 1.0 offered 20 commands. Excel 2003 has 350 commands. There is no way to effectively layer 350 commands on 9 menu options - people can not find what they are looking for.  The new user interface is called "The Ribbon". It is context-sensitive like the current right-click menus. Instead of tiny toolbar icons, it has big buttons and words. The most powerful things are very evident in The Ribbon.  For a lot of people blogging about the release, they all seem to have heartburn that there is not a "classic" view that will bring back the old menu system.  I initially thought this was insane. However, after seeing it first-hand for a couple of days, I really think that this is a vast improvement.  I think this is a small hurdle, it will annoy me for 2 days, but once I get past it, then I have the full power of 1.1 million rows and more power to analyze data with Excel. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

9) In the MVP Excel breakout session, they showed some other features that have not been shown elsewhere. There are some gems in here, just in case #2, #3, #4, and #5 weren't enough. As soon as Dave Gainer talks about them, I will bring them up.

My take... a lot of people are still using Excel 97 or Excel 2000 and this is fine because Microsoft had not added much new stuff since Excel 97. It made it great as an author, because a screen shot from Excel 2003 looked almost like the screen shot from Excel 97 - you could write about seven years of Office releases with one book.

However, I think that this version has so much good stuff - it will be very very compelling for people to upgrade.  I was talking with a casual Excel user last night, and just that day, he had been burned by the 65,536 row limit. Other people want more than 3 conditional formatting. It will be easier for regular people to find the powerful features that are currently buried. 

The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.

Anyway - I've started this post for us to discuss the changes. If you hear of a new feature, feel free to post about it here. 

Bill


----------



## Legacy 98055

Beta is out...

First look that I have had.  I think, very nice...


----------



## yankee428

Just downloaded the Beta release.  Very hard to navigate at first without menu bar.  Looks more like a MacIntosh product. Might just take getting used to, we'll see.  Will be interesting to see how code that manipulates toolbars work.  

Looks like MS is going to kill the app if you don't have authentic version of office and of windows.  At roughly $500 every two years - that's not going to happen.  I think google is going to take so much marketshare by picking up the casual users, that Office is in trouble.


----------



## TrippyTom

Well, I downloaded beta2 at home and I have to say, I'm VERY unhappy with the ribbon.  It seems great for noobies, but for Power Users it's a complete nightmare!

Toolbars don't exist anymore.  You can't even tear-off either!  This is 10 steps in the OPPOSITE direction for me.  I plan to uninstall it (if I can) tonight when I get home.


----------



## Oaktree

Maybe they should call it Office 2008     

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060629/bs_nm/microsoft_delay_dc_2


----------



## SydneyGeek

About code that manipulates toolbars ---

I opened a file with a custom menu item. It uses the standard table-based menu builder, and it placed it in some wacky, out-of-the-way location in the Ribbon. Also, the menu didn't work. 

So, if you have built custom menus and toolbars, they will need to be revamped. From the blurb that I've seen, it's an excursion into XML but I have not yet seen any decent sample code. 

I like the extra rows. Much better for large imports. I also don't mind the eye candy effects -- formatting tables on the fly -- but if existing functionality breaks when you upgrade, I don't see corporates moving to it any time soon. 

Denis


----------



## Zack Barresse

You can customize the Ribbon, but it's difficult.  I'm looking at an example right now from Ken Puls who has successfully edited and added items to the Ribbon.  It's tricky and in-depth; I hope they [MS] improve it.


----------



## TrippyTom

It still upsets me.  I don't like having everything on top!  I want the ability to CUSTOMIZE IT AT WILL like we've always been able to do.  The "eye candy" doesn't outweight the serious flaws they have introduced with this design.  I hope they make it more customizable.

Maybe I'm just turning into one of those old farts that can't accept change.


----------



## just_jon

Reading the comments reminds me of moving from Unix to MS:

"Windows, I don't need no stinkin' windows."

"Menus! Crap, I *know* what I want, why in God's name I want a freakin' menu?"


----------



## BGrunt73

i wonder how much they are going to charge for the new office, it looks pretty sweet, but probobly not in my budget unless my company offers it at a discount


----------



## scu77

deleted


----------



## MrExcel

There have been four instances where Microsoft has shown Office 12 to the public.  Some high-level customers went out to Redmond in August. They showed it at the Professional Developers Conference in September. They showed it at the Publishers Summit in late September, and then again at the MVP Summit in late September.  To get in, you had to sign an NDA saying that you wouldn't discuss what you saw. However, some facts about Office 12 have been made public on various Microsoft websites, so I feel pretty safe in talking about these items. (After I wrote this, I went back and noted the public source where someone from Microsoft talked about the feature to make sure I am not treading anywhere that I shouldn't).

1) This is the most substantial new release of Excel since '95 or '97. (Source: my opinion).

2) The grid is expanding to 2^20 rows and 10,000+ columns. The final column is column XFD. The final row is around 1.1 million. (Source: Dave Gainer Weblog)

3) Charting has been completely rewritten. There are not new chart types, but the look and feel of the charts is light-years ahead of the current charts. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video on Channel 9)

4) You can now natively create PDF files from all Office applications. (Source: Steve Sinofsky released us from NDA for this one fact and said we could tell about this)

5) Pivot Tables and conditional formatting have been made easier. Conditional Formatting is incredibly powerful now - you can easily create visual views of your data. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video).  I *love* the Data Bar view as shown here in Dave Gainer's Blog

6) Keyboard-centric people will love that every single option available in the program will now be keyboard accessible. Not half, not most , but every single option.  I love the keyboard, I love memorizing keyboard shortcuts for the common things (I even think, Alt-EIJ when I need to edit-fill-justify. It is hard for me not to say, "just Alt-EIJ that range").  And yes - there is a classic mode for people who know the old shortcuts. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

7) Mouse-centric people will love that a new floating toolbar appears with the stuff usually in the right-click menu.  It is the same sort of semi-transparent thing that Outlook 2003 shows when a new e-mail arrives. If you move the mouse towards the toolbar, it becomes solid, otherwise it fades away.  I can see that this will be a huge timesaver - all of the good options just a few pixels from the current cell. (Julie Larsen Green Video)

8) They have completely re-thought menus and toolbars.  Word 1.0 offered 20 commands. Excel 2003 has 350 commands. There is no way to effectively layer 350 commands on 9 menu options - people can not find what they are looking for.  The new user interface is called "The Ribbon". It is context-sensitive like the current right-click menus. Instead of tiny toolbar icons, it has big buttons and words. The most powerful things are very evident in The Ribbon.  For a lot of people blogging about the release, they all seem to have heartburn that there is not a "classic" view that will bring back the old menu system.  I initially thought this was insane. However, after seeing it first-hand for a couple of days, I really think that this is a vast improvement.  I think this is a small hurdle, it will annoy me for 2 days, but once I get past it, then I have the full power of 1.1 million rows and more power to analyze data with Excel. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

9) In the MVP Excel breakout session, they showed some other features that have not been shown elsewhere. There are some gems in here, just in case #2, #3, #4, and #5 weren't enough. As soon as Dave Gainer talks about them, I will bring them up.

My take... a lot of people are still using Excel 97 or Excel 2000 and this is fine because Microsoft had not added much new stuff since Excel 97. It made it great as an author, because a screen shot from Excel 2003 looked almost like the screen shot from Excel 97 - you could write about seven years of Office releases with one book.

However, I think that this version has so much good stuff - it will be very very compelling for people to upgrade.  I was talking with a casual Excel user last night, and just that day, he had been burned by the 65,536 row limit. Other people want more than 3 conditional formatting. It will be easier for regular people to find the powerful features that are currently buried. 

The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.

Anyway - I've started this post for us to discuss the changes. If you hear of a new feature, feel free to post about it here. 

Bill


----------



## PolarBear

My concern is that MS is going to find a way to force you to upgrade to Vista to get the most of out Office 12. 

At the office, I don't care, but I don't want Vista's spyware sitting on my home system, suddenly deciding that my (legitimate) copy of Office is bogus (as has happened to many users so far, according to Slashdot), and then shutting down my system. This means I won't be able to take work home with me. Also, to get 1.1 million rows, what kind of RAM are you going to need to get any reasonable response time? Five minute recalcs, anyone? 

And at my office, we still have people using Excel 95, which means my 2003 macros don't work for some. As my firm is not exactly tech-friendly (our core system is a character-based AS-400, for crying out loud), we're not going to upgrade everyone automatically - the costs in RAM, processors, etc. would be prohibitive. So upgrading is just going to put more of a barrier between me and my users. 

I certainly won't be first in the queue for this upgrade, regardless of how much I would like the extra power. I think it's going to cause me more problems than it will solve.


----------



## SydneyGeek

scu77, I think this comes down to memory requirements. 

The Excel worksheet at the moment contains 4^12 cells. 
Excel 2007 has 4^17, that's 256 times bigger. 

Entering a value into all cells of an Excel 2007 sheet is going to max out your RAM very quickly. 

Polarbear, I'm not sure that MS will force you to upgrade to Vista and 2007 simultaneously -- unless you buy a new PC after the release date, when the earlier products have been withdrawn from sale. 

I plan to have Office 2007 on one of my PC's so I can get used to it. None of my clients will be going to it any time soon, and I won't be pushing them to. I still haven't weaned them all off Access 97 yet --   -- they're scared of the database not working, regardless of the fact that I have updated their db's in about 20 minutes!! 

When 2007 has some market share I'll use it out there. Until then, it's a curiosity and a learning project.

Also, I agree about Vista. I prefer to use 3rd party security apps (firewalls, antivirus, anti-spyware) and I understand that MS was making it hard for these guys to work with Vista, thus giving their own security products an unfair advantage. No thanks, not till I can use the software of my choice. 

Denis


----------



## MrExcel

I had read somewhere that Office 2007 would be "better with Vista".  But, I put two machines side by side, one running the beta Office on Windows XP and one running on a beta Vista.

Other than differences in the File Open dialog, nothing else appears to have changed.


----------



## SydneyGeek

Bill, 

Have you any recommendations for minimum hardware specs and Vista? I've read that you can forget about the bells and whistles without decent graphics -- either a card, or the integrated graphics on the latest chipsets -- and minimum 1Gb RAM. 

Is that your experience?

Denis


----------



## Joe C

What going to happen with pivot tables. How many rows are they going to be able to use?


----------



## SydneyGeek

> What going to happen with pivot tables. How many rows are they going to be able to use?



The full worksheet. 1 million rows, 16K columns

Denis


----------



## iknowu99

Peoplez, what happened? where is the big finale? seems like Excel2003 is the way to be...


----------



## SydneyGeek

Just found one definite advantage of Excel 2007 -- working with huge files. 

A client (with no access to a database) needed to do some analysis of a large dataset. After some wrangling we had a starting worksheet with 55K lines and 256 columns of data: 100MB of raw data   

He then needed to crunch another dataset using this base data, and his PC just flat out refused to do it. We put it on my new PC, with plenty of RAM and Office 2007, and it did the job. Even though we didn't exceed the row and column limits of the old version, the improved memory handling of Excel 2007 made quite a difference. 

I don't plan on doing anything like that again in the near future, but knowing that you _can_ work with files in excess of 300MB is reassuring...

Denis


----------



## Richard Schollar

300Mb?!?!?!?!       Oh my...


----------



## SydneyGeek

That's what I thought too.   

And it was _almost pure data_ -- all formulas removed except for the first row of each sheet. 

Never again...  but it shows what the new version can do, if pushed. (Core 2 Duo, 2Gb RAM, and converting about 16K formulas at a time to values was taking over a minute). 

Denis


----------



## MrExcel

There have been four instances where Microsoft has shown Office 12 to the public.  Some high-level customers went out to Redmond in August. They showed it at the Professional Developers Conference in September. They showed it at the Publishers Summit in late September, and then again at the MVP Summit in late September.  To get in, you had to sign an NDA saying that you wouldn't discuss what you saw. However, some facts about Office 12 have been made public on various Microsoft websites, so I feel pretty safe in talking about these items. (After I wrote this, I went back and noted the public source where someone from Microsoft talked about the feature to make sure I am not treading anywhere that I shouldn't).

1) This is the most substantial new release of Excel since '95 or '97. (Source: my opinion).

2) The grid is expanding to 2^20 rows and 10,000+ columns. The final column is column XFD. The final row is around 1.1 million. (Source: Dave Gainer Weblog)

3) Charting has been completely rewritten. There are not new chart types, but the look and feel of the charts is light-years ahead of the current charts. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video on Channel 9)

4) You can now natively create PDF files from all Office applications. (Source: Steve Sinofsky released us from NDA for this one fact and said we could tell about this)

5) Pivot Tables and conditional formatting have been made easier. Conditional Formatting is incredibly powerful now - you can easily create visual views of your data. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video).  I *love* the Data Bar view as shown here in Dave Gainer's Blog

6) Keyboard-centric people will love that every single option available in the program will now be keyboard accessible. Not half, not most , but every single option.  I love the keyboard, I love memorizing keyboard shortcuts for the common things (I even think, Alt-EIJ when I need to edit-fill-justify. It is hard for me not to say, "just Alt-EIJ that range").  And yes - there is a classic mode for people who know the old shortcuts. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

7) Mouse-centric people will love that a new floating toolbar appears with the stuff usually in the right-click menu.  It is the same sort of semi-transparent thing that Outlook 2003 shows when a new e-mail arrives. If you move the mouse towards the toolbar, it becomes solid, otherwise it fades away.  I can see that this will be a huge timesaver - all of the good options just a few pixels from the current cell. (Julie Larsen Green Video)

8) They have completely re-thought menus and toolbars.  Word 1.0 offered 20 commands. Excel 2003 has 350 commands. There is no way to effectively layer 350 commands on 9 menu options - people can not find what they are looking for.  The new user interface is called "The Ribbon". It is context-sensitive like the current right-click menus. Instead of tiny toolbar icons, it has big buttons and words. The most powerful things are very evident in The Ribbon.  For a lot of people blogging about the release, they all seem to have heartburn that there is not a "classic" view that will bring back the old menu system.  I initially thought this was insane. However, after seeing it first-hand for a couple of days, I really think that this is a vast improvement.  I think this is a small hurdle, it will annoy me for 2 days, but once I get past it, then I have the full power of 1.1 million rows and more power to analyze data with Excel. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

9) In the MVP Excel breakout session, they showed some other features that have not been shown elsewhere. There are some gems in here, just in case #2, #3, #4, and #5 weren't enough. As soon as Dave Gainer talks about them, I will bring them up.

My take... a lot of people are still using Excel 97 or Excel 2000 and this is fine because Microsoft had not added much new stuff since Excel 97. It made it great as an author, because a screen shot from Excel 2003 looked almost like the screen shot from Excel 97 - you could write about seven years of Office releases with one book.

However, I think that this version has so much good stuff - it will be very very compelling for people to upgrade.  I was talking with a casual Excel user last night, and just that day, he had been burned by the 65,536 row limit. Other people want more than 3 conditional formatting. It will be easier for regular people to find the powerful features that are currently buried. 

The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.

Anyway - I've started this post for us to discuss the changes. If you hear of a new feature, feel free to post about it here. 

Bill


----------



## Smitty

I have Vista running on a 1.8Gb Dell Dimension 4400 that's 6 years old with 512Mb RAM and everything seems to run OK (hell, the PC even starts!), but I haven't really put anything through its paces.  I do know that Vista wants a new video card, which I can't get for this PC becasue it's "too old" (I did pull it out of the basement).

Overall I like Vista.  I can't say the same for Office 2007.



> Well, I downloaded beta2 at home and I have to say, I'm VERY unhappy with the ribbon. It seems great for noobies, but for Power Users it's a complete nightmare!
> 
> Toolbars don't exist anymore. You can't even tear-off either! This is 10 steps in the OPPOSITE direction for me. I plan to uninstall it (if I can) tonight when I get home.



Smitty


----------



## dale7690

Here are my two cents 

I've been through most versions of Excel. I believe that in terms of productivity - it really hasn't changed. At least nothing dramatic. ESPECIALLY in Excel 12.

The increase to 1M rows and the enhancement of data connectivity and analysis features all derive from the fact that more and more people are trying to utilize Excel for reporting and analysis purposes ("Business Intelligence"). And in this arena 1M rows hardly scratches the surface.

Unfortunately, Microsoft will not be able to raise the bar high enough until Excel's data engine is COMPLETELY replaced. Or until everybody owns a super computer 

So in the mean time, business users who which to analyze data, are forced to buy 3rd party tools that provide a layer of visualization and some enhanced querying capabilities. But the car is only as good as it's engine...

Dale
http://www.sisense.com
"Dashboards, Reports and Guided Analytics


----------



## jstiene

Extra rows are not a bad idea, but it might be pointless if Excel stops reponding. Its hard to open an Excel file that actually uses more than 40,000 rows as it is.

I know I've built forms in Access that seem to stop responding after about a million rows. Or at least the ap says that its not responding, sometimes it is running.

I don't know what the performance would be like in Excel after, say 50,000. After about 35K I recommend Access anyway. 

Excel is too complex to handle that many rows with good performance because they are all interdependant. IE adding a row changes all the others beneath it.

In fact I rarely delete rows with aps. I clear them then resort. Even automumbering in the last column if I have to sort it back the way it was originally. It is much faster to clear a row and resort than delete 1,000 specifically because of those dependencies. Whereas in Access a table is simply a table, in Excel they are kind of linked together. The ap has to figure out how adding or deleting a row effects others. It was not made for large numbers of records. It is too complex in its dependencies.


----------



## jstiene

I would say they are trying to hook women with the pastel colors, but women already use Office by the scores, so they are trying to hook children with cartoon like giant icons. They want the next generation hooked on Office.

Which is very risky, because 45 year olds are doing the using and buying.

It may become history by the time those kids grow up specifically because they alientated older users. If I can make a freaking form opening old windows with Application.Dialogs there is no reason in hell they couldnt have left old menu items. Or at least as an option.


----------



## jstiene

Actually the extreme change is Access. 07 allows multivalue fields. Thats crazy. Not only will it be incompatable with older versions of Access, and Access has never been very backwards compatible, but it will make Access tables incompatible with EVERYTHING. SQL Server, Oracle, etc. A table is headers and data. That way you can save it as a simple text with CSV, Tab delimited, etc. If you can put more than one data type in a cell, how does this write to text? Or even paste to Excel? Are they trying to make cubes out of a field? 

Have they market tested anything lately, or did they hire a high school kid on LSD to determine their product line? Products should evolve, not burn bridges.


----------



## A Taylor

Does anybody know if the new excel will allow you to insert a mini spreadsheet with most of excels functionality into a comment box attached to a cell? This is a feature that I'm hoping to see in the new release - it would make my job a lot easier.

I have e-mailed MS about this three times and have never had a reply.

This is the single thing that would make me buy it. If it doesnt have this - they are not getting my money!


----------



## Domski

A Taylor said:


> Does anybody know if the new excel will allow you to insert a mini spreadsheet with most of excels functionality into a comment box attached to a cell? This is a feature that I'm hoping to see in the new release - it would make my job a lot easier.
> 
> I have e-mailed MS about this three times and have never had a reply.
> 
> This is the single thing that would make me buy it. If it doesnt have this - they are not getting my money!


 
Comments in general seem to be disliked by a lot of the Excel community (myself included) so don't see it being high on their development list.

Dom


----------



## RoryA

Personally, I think comments are very handy, but I doubt there is very much demand to have worksheets embedded in them. (nor do I think it's a particularly good idea, but that's  a separate issue).


----------



## A Taylor

I use comment boxes all the time - I use them to build up an item cost and have to get my calculator out - it would make my life so much easier if i could attach a mini spreadsheet to a cell that had basic +,-* functionality


----------



## Domski

I'd guess that's probably not what they had in mind when they introduced them


----------



## MrExcel

There have been four instances where Microsoft has shown Office 12 to the public.  Some high-level customers went out to Redmond in August. They showed it at the Professional Developers Conference in September. They showed it at the Publishers Summit in late September, and then again at the MVP Summit in late September.  To get in, you had to sign an NDA saying that you wouldn't discuss what you saw. However, some facts about Office 12 have been made public on various Microsoft websites, so I feel pretty safe in talking about these items. (After I wrote this, I went back and noted the public source where someone from Microsoft talked about the feature to make sure I am not treading anywhere that I shouldn't).

1) This is the most substantial new release of Excel since '95 or '97. (Source: my opinion).

2) The grid is expanding to 2^20 rows and 10,000+ columns. The final column is column XFD. The final row is around 1.1 million. (Source: Dave Gainer Weblog)

3) Charting has been completely rewritten. There are not new chart types, but the look and feel of the charts is light-years ahead of the current charts. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video on Channel 9)

4) You can now natively create PDF files from all Office applications. (Source: Steve Sinofsky released us from NDA for this one fact and said we could tell about this)

5) Pivot Tables and conditional formatting have been made easier. Conditional Formatting is incredibly powerful now - you can easily create visual views of your data. (Source: Julie Larsen-Green Video).  I *love* the Data Bar view as shown here in Dave Gainer's Blog

6) Keyboard-centric people will love that every single option available in the program will now be keyboard accessible. Not half, not most , but every single option.  I love the keyboard, I love memorizing keyboard shortcuts for the common things (I even think, Alt-EIJ when I need to edit-fill-justify. It is hard for me not to say, "just Alt-EIJ that range").  And yes - there is a classic mode for people who know the old shortcuts. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

7) Mouse-centric people will love that a new floating toolbar appears with the stuff usually in the right-click menu.  It is the same sort of semi-transparent thing that Outlook 2003 shows when a new e-mail arrives. If you move the mouse towards the toolbar, it becomes solid, otherwise it fades away.  I can see that this will be a huge timesaver - all of the good options just a few pixels from the current cell. (Julie Larsen Green Video)

8) They have completely re-thought menus and toolbars.  Word 1.0 offered 20 commands. Excel 2003 has 350 commands. There is no way to effectively layer 350 commands on 9 menu options - people can not find what they are looking for.  The new user interface is called "The Ribbon". It is context-sensitive like the current right-click menus. Instead of tiny toolbar icons, it has big buttons and words. The most powerful things are very evident in The Ribbon.  For a lot of people blogging about the release, they all seem to have heartburn that there is not a "classic" view that will bring back the old menu system.  I initially thought this was insane. However, after seeing it first-hand for a couple of days, I really think that this is a vast improvement.  I think this is a small hurdle, it will annoy me for 2 days, but once I get past it, then I have the full power of 1.1 million rows and more power to analyze data with Excel. (Source: Jensen Harris blog)

9) In the MVP Excel breakout session, they showed some other features that have not been shown elsewhere. There are some gems in here, just in case #2, #3, #4, and #5 weren't enough. As soon as Dave Gainer talks about them, I will bring them up.

My take... a lot of people are still using Excel 97 or Excel 2000 and this is fine because Microsoft had not added much new stuff since Excel 97. It made it great as an author, because a screen shot from Excel 2003 looked almost like the screen shot from Excel 97 - you could write about seven years of Office releases with one book.

However, I think that this version has so much good stuff - it will be very very compelling for people to upgrade.  I was talking with a casual Excel user last night, and just that day, he had been burned by the 65,536 row limit. Other people want more than 3 conditional formatting. It will be easier for regular people to find the powerful features that are currently buried. 

The "gotcha" that I can see - upgrading needs to be an all-or-nothing thing for a company. If you have Excel 12 and have 350,000 rows of data and some of your co-workers are still on Excel 2000 - you won't be able to share that data.

Anyway - I've started this post for us to discuss the changes. If you hear of a new feature, feel free to post about it here. 

Bill


----------



## Richard Schollar

A Taylor said:


> I use comment boxes all the time - I use them to build up an item cost and have to get my calculator out - it would make my life so much easier if i could attach a mini spreadsheet to a cell that had basic +,-* functionality



I must admit I don't understand: you're wanting to use spreadsheet functionality within a comment rather than just doing it within the spreadsheet that houses the comment?  Why not just miss out the comment altogether?


----------



## A Taylor

Hi Richard, it does sound a bit stupid doesnt it. Im a Surveyor and produce Bills of Quantities in Excel-  columns include quantity, unit, rate  and extension - and the comment boxes are very useful for noting where the quantities come from and how the rate is built up - yes I could do sums at the side but it would make the spreadsheet very untidy.

You can do a lot with comment boxes -but cant get one to add 2 + 2 - I think a lot of users would find this useful


----------



## RoryA

Wouldn't it be better to have a fully itemised list and then a summary based off that?


----------



## A Taylor

Hi Rory - thats mainly what i do - I have a lot of key dims (large calculations) and do them on a separate worksheet that I link to the main spreadsheet, but for smaller calculations I use the comment boxes - each dimension is side noted too.

Maybe I'm using Excel in a peculiar way.

There is another feature that I would like to see in the next release - you cant currently tell excel which rows you would like repeated (printed) at the bottom of every page.(like you can at the top) This would be handy for anyone doing formatted reports of any kind that run to 2 or more pages

Stewart


----------



## RoryA

A Taylor said:


> Maybe I'm using Excel in a peculiar way.



The problem is we *all* are! There's no way MS can accommodate all change requests, so I would guess they go by simple frequency - hence the new Ribbon; something like 90% of change requests are for features already present that people can't find. (insert your own sarcastic comment here!)

I have not yet seen Office 2010 (and even if I had, I wouldn't be able to comment) so don't know what has been added in terms of UI funcitonality.


----------

