The inaugural edition of the Excel Dashboard and Visualization Boot Camp finished a short while ago. Mike Alexander and I entertained a crowd of over 30 brave souls who braved the onslaught of charting and VBA and Excel and PowerPoint and Access. I’m still in Dallas until my flight leaves at 7 am Saturday morning. I’ll have to get up at 4:30, but that might help me snooze on the plane.

I enjoy teaching at these conferences, and this was the most motivated and savvy group I’ve ever taught. I got through the introductory material in record time, and covered more material in more time than ever before. not that it’s a race, we want folks to absorb some of it. I was impressed at how well everyone kept up on their laptops, and at the quality of comments and questions they posed. I’m looking forward to doing this again, perhaps in the spring.

On a side note, the Office Sustained Engineering Blog reports that Office 2007 SP2 will be available “between February and April of 2009″. Among the items we can expect are:

• Improved functionality in Excel’s charting mechanism
• Enabling Object Model support for Charts in PowerPoint and Word

These are both good news. While teaching, I feel guilty at the frequency I have to say, “This doesn’t work in Excel 2007.” Also, a demo I’d prepared for today’s session, showing how to use ActiveX controls on a slide to interact with an embedded Excel chart, worked great in 2003 and failed in 2007, because the pasted Excel chart is inaccessible to VBA. The workaround, which I can usually find, is to insert the chart using Insert from File, which explicitly adds it to the slide as an OLE object; Excel 2003 and earlier pastes charts as OLE objects, but Excel 2007 pastes it as an “Office Chart”.

Related Posts:

• Interesting Stuff (19 Sept 2008)
• PTS Charting Classes
• Places to Go, Things to See (2008-Sept-05)
• Charting Best Practices in PowerPoint
• Links and Updates 2008-August-29
• Miscellaneous Notes for 11 June 2009
• Links for September 12, 2008
• What happened to my favorite Excel 2003 Chart feature?
• Chart Event Class Module to Highlight a Series
• Excel Templates Demystified