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Excel uses a powerful vector system for managing formulas. Each cell can be linked to many others using formulas. In a simple way of explaining this, 2 cells can be added together in a third cell using a formula that references them. The columns are named alphabetically and the rows numerically.

Thus the first cell is known as A1.

Here are two numbers in cells.

It is easy to create a formula that adds 2 cells, E.g., =A1+A2. Entering this formula in cell A3 effectively sums the first 2 cells into the 3rd cell.

Just kidding I don't have a crystal ball, and it should be SpyJournal - but I thought the accidental typo made a cool pun!

However what this post is about is revealing a plan to write a number of Back To Basics series. These will be written from two points of views, mine and Amanda's.

The reasons for the series.

Microsoft is investigating new public reports of a vulnerability in Microsoft
Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 2, Microsoft Office Excel Viewer 2003, Microsoft
Office Excel 2002, Microsoft Office Excel 2000, and Microsoft Excel 2004 for
Mac. At this time, our initial investigation indicates that customers who are
using Microsoft Office Excel 2007 or Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac, or who have
installed Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service Pack 3 are not affected by this
vulnerability.

This vulnerability cannot be exploited on Microsoft Office Excel 2003 Service
Pack 3, Microsoft Office Excel 2007, Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Service Pack 1,
or Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac.

Full details Microsoft Security Advisory (947563)

David Gainer writes an Excel blog for Microsoft. He often has guest posts written by insiders from Microsoft exposing cool excel secrets.

Two in particular I have noticed recently are these.

Scott Ruble, a lead program manager on the Excel team who focuses on the area of data visualization discusses how to create an intraday time series chart.

Periodically, users need to create a chart where the data occurs within a single day such as by the minute or hour. This is actually fairly easy to do but unfortunately isn’t very obvious. A typical scenario is you own a restaurant that takes phone orders and you want to reduce the wait time for customers placing an order. This is influenced by a number of factors but a big one is the number of people calling at the same time. As such, you would want to staff your phone lines with more people during the busy times. The key here is to determine when the busy times are and by how much.