1.1 Million Rows - A Discussion About Excel 12

Joined
Feb 8, 2002
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Office Version
  1. 365
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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
 
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

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
 
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Excel Facts

Repeat Last Command
Pressing F4 adds dollar signs when editing a formula. When not editing, F4 repeats last command.
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!)
:-D
 
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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.
 
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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.
 
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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 :-D
 
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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...
 
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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
 
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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
 
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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.
 
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