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Excel 2007

A precis of what we have gleaned is coming up in Excel 2007 (for the full story, go to the truly excellent official Microsoft Blog) or try beta 2 (it's really quite good!). What is below is restricted to what we know about. We shamefacedly admit we are rubbish at Pivot Tables and Excel Lists, so although there have been changes to Pivot Tables, they are not mentioned.

Worksheet Cell Limit increased.

Was: 256 columns x 65,536 rows Now: 16,384 columns 1,048,576 rows. This, it hardly needs saying, is long overdue, but the column change in particular will make a big difference. I have a client who does 40 year monthly cashflows (40x12=480), for whom life will get a whole lot easier.

Functions argument limit increased.

Was: 30 Now: 255. This will help BF quite a bit actually, as with some of BF's Real Estate functions we are running hard up against the 30 (or is it 29?) argument limit. However, like the row/column limits, one shouldn't get carried away come up with nightmarishly complex formulas, functions and worksheets however.

Conditional Formats limit increased.

Was: 3 Now: unlimited. Conditional formats are very useful and underused, probably because of the 3 condition limit (you could partly extend of sorts this using the number formats dialog). Anyway, now that there effectively is no limit, we will see this used a lot more to make spreadsheets more user-friendly.

New Default file type.

Was: BIFF (.xls) Now: Office Open XML (.xlsx). This is interesting, as well as the note below about the Excel Binary file type, but I'm not sure how much it will improve life for the average user.

New higher performance file type.

Now: Excel Binary (.xlsb)

New functionality for XLL (C/C++) add-in developers.

Now: String support greater than 256 characters; Greater than 30 arguments; Ability to obtain calling sheet address (for optimisation purposes). What's great about this is that MS are actually getting behind us XLL developers. The XLL C/C++ interface is really old, sparsely documented, and yet fantastically efficient. The improvements to XLL's, whilst small, mean that MS is actively supporting them and that is... well.. just marvellous!

VSTO Add-ins improved..

IMHO, VSTO/Managed Add-Ins have edged forward but maybe not the method of choice just yet.

New interface.

Was: Traditional Windows menu style. Now: The Menu Ribbon. I must say I am still getting used to this. It seems to make the product more complicated to start with (I'm not sure why) amd all those Alt-menu short cuts you memorised basically don't seem to work. Hmmm... not sure.

Conditional Formatting greatly expanded

Icons in cells. Color Scale mini-chart.

Charts: interface, chart styles expanded

The basic chart package is the same, I think, but MS have made its use easier and the results more professional.

New web-based Excel Server (Excel Web Services)..

I was very interested in this to start with and people really, really want to use their spreadsheets on the web, for example so that clients can run sensitivities. But ... I can't say I will be delving into this any time soon, there seem to be quite a few restrictions and complications, understandably so perhaps.

Improved Range Names dialog.

New Multiple Criteria SUMIFS and other functions.

Whats Missing?

True 3D. If I could put one thing on the roadmap, it would be to make Excel truly 3 dimensional, ie a cube, not a collection of sheets. This would really pay off when applied to functions. Now, SUM() supports multiple sheet references, but most other functions, notably SUMIF, don't. This means that if you have an entity-to-a-sheet approach (eg buildings, tenants, companies), to consolidate them is currently crude (basically just using SUM). But, this is probably too big a change for this version of Excel. Maybe later...

General Direction?

The general direction Excel is taking seems to be to genuinely listen to users, get rid of some antiquated restrictions, make spreadsheets look better, and move towards integrating PC and web-based spreadsheets. It's without doubt the biggest release since Excel 97, to be much applauded.

Last updated: 14 August 2006

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