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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

I came across an interesting issue yesterday. I found a limit that I was previously unaware of in Excel 2003.

I had written some code that was taking data from a large data set into an array, filtering for some specific information and writing the results to another array. Then I was attempting to paste that array data into a range in the spreadsheet as a report. All was working well until I selected one specific set of inputs and ran the report. Suddenly it stopped pasting halfway though the paste. That is it would paste some of the data and not the rest and the code would break on the paste function. After some analysis I determined that the particular cell it kept breaking on had 1400 characters in it. Some research on Google helped. I discovered two things.

Back to work and back to an inbox full of things to do. I have spent a massive amount of time this last week working – the sailing holiday is now a dim and distant memory!

First some riding news. I got my bike back with the rear shock rebuilt (under warranty) and took it for a test ride with the MTB ride group yesterday. It held up just fine and the ride was an epic one - if a little long for my liking. The Saturday MTB group is back – meeting at the Wolves Bike Den every Saturday at midday for an epic ride like this. All ages and experiences welcome.

Map and terrain detail on bikely of the Ewen Maddock Dam Ride Click the pictures for more detail.

Dick Kusleika writes:

The Excel object model provides the Application.CalculationInterruptKey property to control how/if calculation can be interrupted. xlAnyKey is the default and it pauses whenever the user starts working. xlEscKey only pauses when the escape key is pressed. It’s used when you want to allow the user to interrupt calculation, but you want to make sure they do it explicitly and not by accident. xlNoKey prevents interruption. It seems that any time you calculate in code, you should set this property to xlNoKey, then set it back.

Full article here

My stats for June. Not quite as good as J-Walks – though my bounce rate is better!

I have had a bunch of pretty cool Excel things to post up – and finally got around to clearing my flagged items and browser windows.

Conditional Formatting

I have written a couple of articles on Conditional formatting in Excel 2007 with lots of readers comments and requests for help. They are the two most read articles on this site.

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

I was very interested then to come across this article on Joseph’s site by Amit Velingkar where he shows you how to change the automatic colour ranges that are used in Excel 2007 for conditional formatting. He even includes some VBA code for this.