The Office 365 Garage Series has a video on what’s new in the Office Apps, and they demonstrate some cool new features. The Excel App is mentioned at the 7:12 mark, when they look at the new APIs for formatting.
However, at the 3:12 mark, they downplay the old development methods, including VBA and COM, and rave about the new methods — HTML and JavaScript, that are used for the online versions of Office.
Apparently it’s almost impossible to find people who are still working in the older development platforms. What do you think of the chart they use to “validate” the trend? Are they really using a sample size of 12 COM jobs, compared to a final number of 5 JavaScript jobs? I’m not a statistician, but that doesn’t qualify as “dramatic decline” versus a “huge insurgence” in my opinion!
I did like the way that he drew on the chart though, to change it from a column to a line chart. You can see that at the 4:20 mark in the video below.
Or watch on YouTube: What’s new in the world of apps for Office?
Contextures Posts
Here’s what I posted recently:
- Use the REPT function to set a minimum row height. Makes it easier to read a list, or maintain row height for pictures.
- Hide the date picker calendar icon for Time fields in Microsoft Access
- I’ve added a pivot table index on my website, and am updating the pivot table FAQ section.
- FastExcel can help speed up your workbook calculations, and I finally had a chance to test it — you can read my review here.
NOTE: you’ll get 50% off the bundle price, if you use Coupon Code FXLV3Intro by the deadline — July 31 2014.
- Finally, for a humorous peek at what other people are saying about spreadsheets, read the latest collection of Excel tweets, on my Excel Theatre blog.
Other Excel Articles
Here are a few of the Excel articles that I read recently, that you might find useful:
- While teaching an Excel class, Gretchen Uhas discovered that the Pivot Table Field List can float. I usually leave the task panes docked at the right side, but you can move them to the left side too.
- Dick Moffat explains the struggles of importing corporate data into Excel, due to the roadblocks built by DBAs and 3rd Party software developers.
- You can use RAND or RANDBETWEEN to create random data in a Uniform Distribution. If you need Normally Distributed random numbers, Mike Alexander shares a User Defined Function to create them.
- Ricky Brundritt, Bing Maps Program Manager, shows how to visualize Excel data on Bing maps. Most of the methods require Office 2013, but there is an add-in for older versions too (2007 and 2010).
- When you’re programming in VBA, you might get a popup Compiler error message, if you make a mistake. Garry Robinson shows how to turn that feature off.
- If you’d like to listen to some Excel tips, instead of reading them, Chandoo has upload a new podcast. You can download the transcript too, if you’d rather read.
Excel Announcements
Here are some upcoming events, courses, recently published books, and other new items, related to Excel.
| Power Query for Power BI and Excel by Chris Webb
”Power Query makes it easy to extract data from many different data sources, filter that data, aggregate it, clean it and perform calculations on it, finally loading that data into either your worksheet or directly into the new Excel 2013 Data Model used by Power Pivot. This concise, practical book provides a complete guide to Power Query and how to use it to solve all of your Excel data-loading problems.” |
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| Excel Tables: A Complete Guide (pdf version) by Zack Barresse and Kevin Jones
”The book begins by explaining what tables are, how to create them, and how they can be used in reporting before moving on to slightly more advanced topics, including slicers and filtering, working with VBA macros, and using tables in the Excel web app. Novice Excel users and experts alike will find relevant, useful, and authoritative information in this one-of-a-kind resource.” |
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| Mynda Treacy’s popular Excel Dashboard course is open for registration, and I highly recommend this online course, which has excellent content, and great student support from Mynda. Registration closes on July 31st. |
Share Your Events and Articles
If you read or wrote any other interesting Excel articles recently, or have upcoming Excel events, please share a link in the comments below, with a brief description. Thanks!
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