In Blue Ribbon Interface I summarized and provided links to a number of recent articles which were critical of Excel 2007’s new Ribbon interface. In his thoughtful comment, my colleague Dennis bemoaned the emotional content of the cited articles, saying one cannot love or hate tools, only individuals. My argument is that I become emotionally [...]

Napoleon Bonaparte is reputed to have said, “A soldier will fight long and hard for a bit of colored ribbon.” Judging from scuttlebutt on the web, Office users have been struggling long and hard to cope with a new colored ribbon.
Author Robert Benchley once said, “The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for [...]

I came across a strange bug in Excel 2007 which will cause a number of programs to fail. I was going over the code in my Connect Two XY Series with Arrows post from May 2008, and decided to try it inExcel 2007. The result was unexpected.
The program was designed to connect corresponding points of [...]

For years I’ve been using a handy routine to label the last point of each series in a chart. Not very fancy, but it detects a point that can’t be labeled because the point itself isn’t plotted, for example, if the series values contain a blank or #N/A error. Trying to add a data label [...]

Microsoft has made a number of changes to how you use error bars in Excel 2007. I wrote an article some time ago, which covered how to use Error Bars in Excel Charts, for versions 97 through 2003. Now it’s well past time for an update.
Warning: This is a long post. It contains a lot [...]

I came across an article on Microsoft’s web site, What happened to my favorite Excel 2003 Chart feature? Normally I just roll my eyes at these articles, but this one caught my attention, and I decided to address some of the items from the article. The article begins:
The improvements to charts in Office Excel 2007 [...]

In 14 Misconceptions About Charts and Graphs Jorge Camoes writes that he prefers the look of Excel 2007 charts to those in 2003. Jorge admits that he doesn’t use Excel 2007 to actually draw his charts, but he reopens his file in Excel 2007 and uses the charts as they are rendered by the new [...]

In Poor Charting Performance in Excel 2007 and Excel 2007 Chart Performance – Revisited I showed results of chart redrawing tests that showed Excel 2007 to be about an order of magnitude slower than Excel 2003 when recalculating chart data and redrawing the charts.
Simon Murphy of Codematic and the Smurf on Spreadsheets blog wondered how [...]

In Poor Charting Performance in Excel 2007 I compared the charting performance of Excel 2007 to that of Excel 2003. I did this by recalculating the random numbers used as chart data for XY and Line charts with 100 to 1000 points, and averaging the time it took to recalculate 100 times.
I used Virtual PC [...]

Since before Excel 2007 came out, there have been a number of complaints about how slowly its new graphics engine rendered charts. I decided to run a comparison between Excel 2007 SP1 and Excel 2003 SP3. To level the playing field, I ran each in Virtual PC within its own virtual machine, each allocated 513 [...]