Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

As Office 2010 becomes more prevalent in the workplace (most of our clients either have or will be soon updating to it) so the use of the ribbon has become more natural and intuitive for people. It is certainly much more intuitive than the old menu driven interface.

Play a fun game called Ribbon Hero 2 that allows you to learn the fastest and best ways to do various common tasks in the various Office Apps. My kids are using this to learn the interface and some of these common tasks. I have even learnt some things in the 5 minutes I have spent playing it so far! Download Ribbon Hero 2.

Take the first step in growing your Excel Skills. Microsoft have created a series of learning videos that assist new users to Excel to grow their skills

Learn how to create your own Excel Macros with a free training course. Ideal for the entry level person who wants to explore macro writing for the first time. Note this doesn't create efficient code, but its a start to understanding how the VBA code interacts with Excel.

PowerPivot for Excel - if you have looked or used PowerPivot (See my review of Power Pivot) than this page has some good links for additional resources.

Ribbon

The ribbon is also extensible via code and can be added to or modified as required for specific applications and requirements.

Enable or Disable Custom Ribbon Buttons in Excel 2007-2010. Links from Ron to his site where he shows how to work with the ribbon in VBA.

Avoid losing the state of the global IRibbonUI ribbon object. Frederique explains the problem and points to how to solve it.

Performance

Charles Williams has some great performance related code tips.

Write efficient VBA UDFs using Excel Functions inside a UDF - Part 1

Write efficient VBA UDFs using Excel Functions inside a UDF - Part 2

Lookups

Charley Kyd talks about Excels fastest Lookup Methods the INDEX MATCH dual formula approach is much faster than the single VLOOKUP formula. I have been using this method for some time now to significantly improve calculation times in large workbooks and lookups on data sets.

Daniel Ferry writes on Excel Hero a very good reference guide to using the INDEX and INDEX MATCH functions in numerous scenarios including dynamic range names (in place of volatile functions like OFFSET).

Tushar writes about how to perform Two Dimensional Lookups.

Finally Mikkel Sciegienny explains in depth how to use INDEX MATCH in this user friendly article.