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

 

[Richard Schollar]

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]

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.