Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

Office twenty-ten (the correct way of saying it) has some awesome new features over Office 2003 and 2007.

The following links highlight some of the amazing things that are going on and I must say I am pretty impressed so far.

Joseph Chirilov has been busy writing (and geting guest writers to write) articles about both the upcoming changes in Excel 2010 as well as a series on using sparklines in Excel 2007 and 2010. Sparklines are mini in-line charts that can graphically display data in a very small space.

This article has been written in response to a readers question.

Traci writes:

When I take a spreadsheet that someone else has created & remove some unwanted columns & rows, add a notes column of my own outside of the last column of their original spreadsheet, it won’t pick up that last “notes” column when it sorts.  If I highlight the entire document it will, but most people don’t highlight the whole thing when they sort.  We share this document with other people, they sort it and don’t realize that they didn’t sort the notes field.  Do you know of a fix to include the extra added “notes” column in the “my data has headers” “sort by” option that will travel with the document?

Introducing IncSight DB

Charley Kyd has extended his offerings for business excel users with a new product called IncSight DB.

Unlike his first plug-n-play dashboard product, this one links its reports to an Excel database. This design offers several great advantages:

• It should take less than an hour to set up a report.
• Reports can be updated in seconds each period.
• The Excel database can contain formulas that return data from PivotTables, text files, OLAP databases, and other sources.

You can see a video of IncSight DB at his site, which shows how he sets up a new dashboard in about 20 minutes.

Charley is offering a $10 coupon for all orders of $50 or more. But the coupon will be good only for the rest of July. So if you're thinking about ordering, now's the time.

Coupon code: July 2009

When you order IncSight DB, enter this code in the payment form and choose Apply. After you do so, you'll see the discount amount subtracted from your order.

Charley also writes about Excel 2010

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!