Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

There is just so much going on with the whole change over from Office 2007 to 2010, and for those of you still stuck in 2003, even more important for you to start convincing your organisations of the need to go straight to 2010.

We have been running the beta 2010 here solidly an all our main machines here for 2 months now, with some individual test machines previous to that. Unfortunately now we have to have test and development environments in both 2003 and 2007 so that has doubled our required number of Virtual Machines.

Following are some of the latest news and bits and pieces as well as some other MS Office related information I have come across recently.

Excel 2007 and 2010

Conditional formatting. Conditional formatting in 2007 is one of the main reasons people come to Spyjournal.biz. These two articles are the single most hit articles of the thousands here with over 50,000 views between them:

• Conditional formatting in Excel 2007 - entire row colours
• Excel 2007 Conditional Formatting

Amit Velingkar has written conditional formatting rules simplified while Dick Kusleika has written some code to list out all the conditional formatting rules in a worksheet

Its been a while since i wrote an Excel only post – apologies for that. This one is all about Excel. Seeing as we are now less than 2 months away from Excel 2010 there’s a heavy focus on that. I am now using the beta on my production  development machines though still using Excel 2003 in our virtual machine development environments. Some of our clients change slower than a glacier but we need to be able to support them.

Scatter charts with PowerPivot. Converting Pivot tables to cube formulas in order to access chart types not supported by Pivot tables. Sam has linked to Robs original post.

I have often used spin controls on spreadsheets to allow users to quickly and easily change inputs that affect charts or spreadsheet results. Cell Matrix has a good set of instructions on How to add an ActiveX SpinButton control to a spreadsheet in Excel 2007.

We are excited to announce a prize giveaway promotion, thanks to the folks over at Ignite Social Media.

Ok the quiz is open to everybody, but unfortunately the prize can only be won by someone who is a US resident.

The Prizes

The prize we will ship is a total value of over $250, and will include a Dell ST2310 23 inch flat panel monitor, keyboard, and mouse.

The Competition

Head to www.exceleratorsquiz.com and take the quiz. You will get a ranking, For example I was a Power User. You can post that on Twitter and Facebook also.

How to win

Post your ranking in the comments below along with your name, City and US post code. Add any other comment you like about Excel 2010 or PowerPivot. Be creative because I  will select a winner based on the comment you write.

Have fun!

Disclaimer. Although I was asked to review this product and received the Black and Decker VPX tools for doing so, I was not influenced by PowerPivot or Ignite Social Media in any way. The following review is entirely my own and not influenced or edited by Power Pivot in anyway.

What is Power Pivot?

First of all, PowerPivot is only available to work with Office 2010, and specifically Excel 2010 and SharePoint 2010. I have the Beta Office 2010 suite running on a test machine and a test user account so as to not interfere with my production environment.

In their own words:

PowerPivot for Excel is a data analysis tool that delivers unmatched computational power directly within the application users already know and love—Microsoft Excel. It’s the user-friendly way to perform data analysis using familiar Excel features you already know, such as the Office Fluent user interface, PivotTable and, PivotChart views, and slicers. It’s the fast way to generate rich and interactive analysis tools, easily mistaken for IT solutions after weeks of effort. It’s the right way to achieve deeper business insight and shorter decision cycles.

Specific features:

• Take advantage of familiar Excel tools and features
• Process massive amounts of data in seconds
• Load even the largest data sets from virtually any source
• Use powerful new analytical capabilities, such as Data Analysis Expressions (DAX)
• Make the most of multi-core processors and gigabytes of memory

The following set of screenshots takes you through the installation, data connection and using the tool.