Microsoft Office

The nerdy, boring sibling of the Microsoft office family, Excel is always associated with mathematical functions, ledgers, and other yawn inducing things. Little did you know, Excel has a secret second life full of fun and weird things! Here’s 10 of them, conveniently displayed in list form for you:

10. Etch-a-Sketch

Remember etch-a-sketch? Now you can doodle away with your keyboard arrows, excel style. This will keep you mildly amused for about ten minutes, but it beats actually doing work with excel.

9. Meeting Bingo

Next time you have a really boring meeting to attend, use this tool to generate some meeting bingo cards for you and your coworkers. Just fill out the the list with your workplaces most trite & overused buzzwords, and you’re ready to go. Winner gets first pick of the new office chairs.

8. Pranks

There’s a lot of different excel modifications you can make to excel to have fun with (or at the expense of) your coworkers. For example, did you know that 2 + 2 = 5 (for large values of 2) ? Install this on your coworkers computer and, with patience, that calculation will eventually find its way into one of their complex worksheets.

7. ASCII Animation

I don’t even want to think about how this was created, but the point is that if you are really bored and inclined, you can.

6. Board Games

That’s right, a completely functional copy of monopoly built right into excel (complete with wheelin’ & dealin’, cut-throat A.I. !) , and it’s not the only board game for excel, you can find most popular board games for excel.

5. Spirograph

The crappy toy is now a crappy excel add-on. Did you know that there’s a direct correlation between the decline of Spirograph and the rise in gang activity? Think about it.

4. Joke Charts & Graphs

Graph Jam features a huge collection of user submitted joke graphs and charts for your amusement. Put Excel’s visualization tools to good use, and make some of your own.

3. Draw

Probably not your first choice in drawing tools, but people have created some jaw-dropping drawings with Excel, and you can too.

2. Make Music

Someone has made a fully functional drum machine and a synthesizer with Excel! One more Excel based instrument, and you could create the geekiest band in the world.

1. Video Games

There’s an entire world of video games ported to excel (like tetris) out there, as well as some made specifically for excel. Try to be productive at work, knowing that.

Microsoft is looking for their newest office (tentatively called Office 2010) to work with other Office programs

Microsoft engineers at the Redmond campus are busy at work with the next iteration of Microsoft Office, tentitively called “Office 2010″.

The hints, innuendos and rumors that have been posted all over the internet (as well as this site) is looking to be more true than not.

The three year wait between Office products is on schedule, according to Ina Fried’s article (link above). The new software is to work with open formerly rival office programs, such as Open Office, Google Docs and the like.

Microsoft is also working to make Office 14 (Office 2010) work with Microsoft phones (and phones in development) and the new up and coming Office Web Aps, that will include Word, Excel and Powerpoint (the Campus’ office mainstay programs). These are to be accessible online, either from their Cloud, including Live Mesh, Windows Live SkyDrive, and Office Live Workspace. Though, I have seen a rumor that Microsoft may combine all their workspaces into one online application. They are already making changes to their Office Live Small Business framework.

It will be interesting to see how Microsoft combines Office 14 with web aps, fully compatible with Open Office, Google Docs and not only with Microsoft phones, but the iPhone, as was reported in the above article. As of now, there are compatibility issues with Microsoft Office 2007 and the above said issues, though Office 2007 Word does have a way to save in the 97-03 formats, I wonder if Office 2010 will have a similar venue, to ’save as’ OOo or google doc?

Team Excel blog posted some useful information for you Excel warriors out there.

When gathering data in Excel it is common to start with information found in a variety of sources, frequently lists or tables located on the Internet. Customers often copy and paste this data into Excel from the original source, but unfortunately this can also unintentionally paste many additional objects into the spreadsheet besides the data. These objects (shapes, text boxes, controls, etc.) are often not noticeable to the user after the paste, but can result in slower performance and larger file sizes. One step customers can take to avoid unwanted, hidden, and invisible objects in their document is to find and remove the objects after the paste operation as part of their data cleansing process.

The following steps will help you find and delete all of the additional objects in your Excel 2007 worksheet.

The first thing you want to do is verify that you have additional objects on your spreadsheet. The easiest way to view a sheet’s objects is to turn on the on the Selection Pane (on the Home Tab go to the Editing Chunk > click the Find and Select Dropdown > select the Selection Pane option making the pane visible). Looking at the selection pane you will see a list of all objects on the current sheet and an indication if the objects are visible or hidden. If the selection pane is blank then you do not have extra objects on the sheet.

Once you have the selection pane open and verified that you have objects on the sheet, the next step is to put your spreadsheet in Design Mode if it is supported on your current workbook. Design Mode will only be enabled in Excel if your sheet contains certain types of controls. Turning on Design Mode will allow you to select all controls, not just the basic shapes and form controls.

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Steven Thomas, of Inside Office Online Blog Sings the praise if Accesses ability to work with Excel files so much, he may even tempt me to transfer my Writing Submission Spreadsheet (which has taken on a life of it’s own) from Excel to Access.

In his article, he give three big steps:

System One: The things themselves

The system that held the files would give me data in comma-delimited text named as if it were an Excel file.

System Two: About those things…

Performance data about the articles was in a SQL Server database. Access talks to SQL Server, no problem.

System Three: The best-laid plans

Plans for new content live in a SharePoint list. Access, as it turns out, talks to SharePoint.

Ok, I have no idea how i’ll start my own process of transfer and whatnot, but it’d sure be nice to have a better format for that information than endless cells running sideways and up and down. With Steven’s accolades on Access and Excel working together, he gives me some interest in trying. If that is successful, I have another spreadsheet on recipes i’ve tried, with my own comments.

Think of the possibilies.

Microsoft has plenty of free Budget templets for Excel to help you manage your money.

Now there’s no excuse not to manage your money. Keep track of family, household, shopping, gifts, business, accounts receivable, accounts payable, etc., right from your home or office computer.

Templets available for download include 2009-2010 Finance Calendar, Event Budget, Family Monthly Bills Budget, Family monthly budget planner, Lawn and Garden budget, Wedding budget planner and many more.

With so many options available, there’s no excuse not to keep track of your expenses, especially in today’s economy, when we all have to start watching our budgets and pinching our pennies.

What budget templetes to you use? If you don’t, which of the budget templetes on the Microsoft Excel budget templete page interests you? And why?

The Microsoft Excel blog posted about using Excel and Word to print envelopes.

They give a pretty detailed explanation, complete with screenshots along the way. If you you use Mail Merge quite often (or need it once) this is a great tool. I, myself, do not have a lot of people (neither in my business life nor my personal life) to mail to. For those that have hundreds of people to send out cards, newsletters, notices or information, Mail Merge is a great way to set up printing and mailing.

You can even get a home United States Postal Service postage stamp machine for your home business and set up home pickup for bulk mailings. Just browse around on the United States Postal Service website for more information.

On the Excel blog, they cover how to:

Create a Table

The first step is to create a Table from the list of addresses.

Define a Name for the Table

Excel allows you to define names that apply to a range of cells in the worksheet. When a name is defined for a Table in a worksheet, the name will update automatically as the table is resized to add or remove data. This is helpful in this case because I want to add and remove addresses during the process of printing envelopes.

Verify Addresses

After my Table is created and a name applied, I start going through the addresses to confirm which ones are correct. I do this by adding a new column to the Table for this year. To do this, just type 2008 in cell H2. The Table and the name that we defined will expand automatically. Once you have the new column, then you can type something in the column to indicate whether the address is correct. I used a “Y” in my list.

And much more. Click the link to learn how.

This is beyond me, but it may help some of you out there. From the Excel Blog: Today’s author, Steve Tullis, a Program Manager on the Excel Services team, talks about the various load balancing schemes available for Excel Services.

I have received a number of questions in the past few weeks about the load balancer administration options available for the Excel Services custom load balancer. Here’s the scoop: the settings account for the “OpenWorkbook” method when first accessing Excel Services. Once you have an active session with a workbook, additional requests from that user will always be sent to the ECS on which the “OpenWorkbook” request was handled.

So, why do we have three options – Workbook URL, Round Robin, and Local? The options are meant to provide the admin better control over the resource usage on his/her farm. An explanation of each option follows:

Workbook URL: Arguably, this provides the most efficient use of your hardware. Requests are sent from the WFE to an ECS based on a hash of the URL. This ensures the same ECS will always handle requests for the same workbook – regardless of the user making the request. Which means a workbook will only ever be retrieved from SharePoint once – until it is pushed out of the cache, or the file changes in SharePoint.
Round robin: Each OpenWorkbook request goes to the next ECS in the rotation. The result is that the same wb can be loaded from SharePoint N times, where N = the number of ECS machines in your farm. Keep in mind two things: (1) requests against an active session will always return to the same ECS, and (2) if the wb is cached on the ECS when an OpenWorkbook request arrives, it will be loaded from cache provided the file has not changed in SharePoint. The benefit with this option is that each concurrent request goes to a different server; thus, theoretically, queues on the server (CPU, I/O) will be shorter, thus requests can be handled more efficiently. The effectiveness of this is dictated by the composition of your workbooks (wbs with very long running calculations tend to invalidate this).
Local: This setting ensures ECS processing happens on the same WFE machine which received the request, which requires that the ECS service must be running on every WFE. Again, the same wb can be loaded N times, where N = the number of ECS / WFE machines in the farm. The benefit here is, theoretically, performance. By running the ECS on the WFE, and reducing the # of server-to-server hops, end user performance should be faster. The cost is in retrieval from SharePoint & cache size due to the potential of the same wb being open on multiple WFEs.

Today’s author, Diego Oppenheimer, a Program Manager on the Excel team, talks about connecting PivotTables to data stored in SharePoint Lists:

Many of us on the Excel team have been approached by customers asking us how to create a connection to a SharePoint list. SharePoint lists can be exported easily by creating a Microsoft Office Excel Web Query. The connection can then be tied directly to lists or PivotTables in the workbook like any other Data Connection.

I have a SharePoint List that we use to upload and keep track of all project management reports. The list contains information like the project manager that uploaded it, the date, and the name of the reports as well as other automated fields created by SharePoint to make my life easier. Using the filters provided by SharePoint gives me a great way navigate my list quickly and easily but I am more interested in creating a macro view of the team reports so an easy solution would be to connect my SharePoint List to a PivotTable. The fact that my SharePoint List has more than 250 rows makes the use of a PivotTable even more appealing.

Creating the Connection and the PivotTable:

Once we have located the SharePoint list we want to export we go to “Export to Spreadsheet” in the “Actions” menu button.

When the message prompting us if we would like to open or save the Microsoft Office Excel Web Query click “Open” (or you can save for use later). If you haven’t started Excel yet this should start it up.

Click “Enable” to unblock the data connection.

If you had Excel already open you will get the the “Import Data” menu. In the case that you did not have Excel open already opening the connection will create a a resfreshable query table in the workbook.

From this menu we can choose to directly create a “PivotTable Report” a report and a “PivotChart” or just a query “Table”. Today I am interested in creating a PivotTable so I select “PivotTable Report” and hit “Ok”.

Now I can see all my uploaded reports in the PivotTable. To get a better view of what is going on we add the Project Manager field to Rows, Date to the Report Filter (so we can filter by date) and the Name field (the name of each one of our uploaded reports on the SharePoint List) to Values. By adding Name to Values we are essentially creating a count of how many name items we have in the data source.

We replace “Count of Name” with “# Reports” by editing in the formula tab like any other cell.

Now I can easily view the numbers of reports per project manager and filter by date as well as viewing the “Grand Total” number of reports. This is great but the team actually splits up in sub teams by area of expertise so I am going to group them to make this clearer.

We select all the members of the each team in the PivotTable and right click. Select “Group”. Now I can rename the Group label to better represent the teams. I name my groups “Finance”. “Technology” & “Operations”.

Combining the use of our Date filter and the groups we created we can easily see a macro view of all the project management reports.

As soon as new reports are populated into my SharePoint List I will be able to update the PivotTable (right click on the PivotTable then click “Refresh”).

Where does the connection live?

Like all other data connections in our work book we can access it by selecting the “Existing Connections” button under the “Data” tab.

We can see that our SharePoint List connection is shown under “Connections in this Workbook” and can now be used to create new PivotTables.

Multiple Microsoft Office Excel Web Queries can be used to monitor more than one SharePoint list at a time as well as to easily analyze the data in them using PivotTables and PivotCharts. The same as with all Office Data Connections you can now use this connection with multiple workbooks and update any connection changes in a single place.

During today’s Professional Development Conference keynote, Ray Ozzie made an exciting announcement about a new way to view, edit, and collaborate with Excel. If you weren’t able to watch the keynote, feel free to check out the following links: PDC Keynote Video, Official MS Press Release, and Channel 9 Video.

In case you’re in a hurry, here’s the bottom line:

We are taking Excel Services, which many of you are already familiar with, and extending it beyond just viewing spreadsheets to authoring, editing and real-time collaboration in the browser!
You will be able to do light-weight editing including formula authoring, formatting and additional Excel features from within any browser: IE, FireFox, and Safari (it is just HTML and AJAX!)
The Excel web application will be available in two channels: as a consumer service offered via Office Live and as a business offering via either hosted subscription or volume licensing.
Any spreadsheets you author or edit online will be compatible with the Excel desktop client.

In part:

As part of the next release of Office, we’re announcing that Microsoft will deliver Office Web applications - lightweight versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote - through a browser. With these new applications, people can use a browser to create, edit, and collaborate on Office documents. What’s great is that this provides a consistent Office experience when and where our customers want it, regardless of whether they are accessing their Office documents through the PC, phone, or browser.

PressPass: What does this announcement mean for Microsoft?

Capossela: We are on a path to deliver all our technology as “software plus services,” and today is an important milestone in this journey. For more than 10 years, millions of workers have benefited from Microsoft cloud-based services, including Hosted Exchange, Outlook Web Access and Live Meeting. Earlier this year, we announced Microsoft Online, which businesses such as Coca-Cola Enterprises, Blockbuster, and Energizer are using to access Exchange and SharePoint over the Web. Last month, more than 1 million people turned to Office Live Workspace for sharing and collaborating over the Internet.

Viewing a Word document in Word Web application.
Click for hi-res version

Today in Los Angeles, we raised the stakes with Office Web applications. With this development, people can benefit from Office as a service on their browser, as a downloadable application on their phone, and as software on their PCs. This is the kind of flexibility that our software plus services approach makes possible, and is helping us deliver the kind of innovation that businesses and consumers expect from Microsoft.

PressPass: How will the Office Web applications benefit customers?

Capossela: Customers’ requirements have changed, as have their expectations of technology. While Office is synonymous with desktop productivity, the idea of “desktop” has

changed from a PC-centric notion to one in which people are empowered on the PC, on the phone, and with a browser.

Our customers don’t use one device, but rather several. They want a seamless, synchronized experience across those devices to help them work smarter, faster, and better. Office Web applications will make that a reality.

From Microsoft Office Online: The procedure in this article creates a new database by first exporting data from the Northwind.mdb sample database into Microsoft Excel, and then getting that information into Access. You can do this by either importing or by linking that data into a new database table.

To export the table to Excel and create the database in Access Open the Northwind sample database.
I can’t find the Northwind.mdb database file

The default folder location of the Northwind sample database is as follows, for these versions of Access:

Access 2003 \Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office11\Samples
Access 2002 \Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office10\Samples
Access 2000 \Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office\Samples

Export the Employees table to an Excel 97-2003 (*.xls) file by clicking Export on the File menu, and then clicking Microsoft Excel 97-2003 (*.xls) in the Save as type box.
Note In Access 2000, select file type Microsoft Excel 97-2000. In Access 2002, select file type Microsoft Excel 97-2002 (*.xls).

Close and then restart Access.
Click Open on the File menu.
Click the arrow to the right of the Look in box, select the path to the Excel file, and then double-click its icon.
On the first page of the wizard, select the First Row Contains Column Headings check box, and then click Next. If you are not using Northwind.mdb, be sure to select the check box only if your data contains column headings in the first row.
On the second page of the wizard:
If you are linking data, type a name for the new table in the Linked Table Name box, and then click Finish.
If you are importing data, click In a New Table, click Next three times to accept the default values, and type a name for the new table in the Import to Table box. Click Finish.
Access creates and opens a new database. If you used the Link Spreadsheet Wizard, Access linked the data in the Excel spreadsheet file to the new table. In the following graphic, notice the icon that designates it as a linked table from Excel. If you used the Import Spreadsheet Wizard, Access imported the Excel spreadsheet as a new table