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

 

[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]

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