Spy Journal 3.0 Filtering the web for you

There is just so much going on with the whole change over from Office 2007 to 2010, and for those of you still stuck in 2003, even more important for you to start convincing your organisations of the need to go straight to 2010.

We have been running the beta 2010 here solidly an all our main machines here for 2 months now, with some individual test machines previous to that. Unfortunately now we have to have test and development environments in both 2003 and 2007 so that has doubled our required number of Virtual Machines.

Following are some of the latest news and bits and pieces as well as some other MS Office related information I have come across recently.

Excel 2007 and 2010

Conditional formatting. Conditional formatting in 2007 is one of the main reasons people come to Spyjournal.biz. These two articles are the single most hit articles of the thousands here with over 50,000 views between them:

• Conditional formatting in Excel 2007 - entire row colours
• Excel 2007 Conditional Formatting

Amit Velingkar has written conditional formatting rules simplified while Dick Kusleika has written some code to list out all the conditional formatting rules in a worksheet

Today I am focussed on clearing out my browser from all the interesting things sitting there. No real organisation to this post – its just a link dump.

• Smashing Magazine useful web design information
• Feeling “Blogged Out?” [10 Pro Bloggers Share Their Advice on What to Do]
• David Willersdorf’s blog
• Australian Institute of Professional Photography
• Judith wrote up the story of last weekend’s DirtFest Adventure on her blog
• My photos from the Salomon Tre-X Triathlon – I was the official photographer for the day
• Results from the DirtFest and Triathlon on the in2adventure website. I got 24th from 32 entrants in my class and 43rd overall.
• Internet Explorer 9 is coming and you can test drive it. It might even be standards compliant!
• Australian students rejoice – you can get Office 2007 with a free upgrade to Office 2010 for only $75.
• Likewise any purchases of Office 2007 now are available with a free upgrade to Office 2010.
• Judith’s team is entered in the Oxfam Trailwalker Sydney – a 100km endurance walk challenge.
• Taking photos with motion blur
• Importing text files in Excel 2007

And I will leave you with some of my best photos from the Triathlon.

Its been a while since i wrote an Excel only post – apologies for that. This one is all about Excel. Seeing as we are now less than 2 months away from Excel 2010 there’s a heavy focus on that. I am now using the beta on my production  development machines though still using Excel 2003 in our virtual machine development environments. Some of our clients change slower than a glacier but we need to be able to support them.

Scatter charts with PowerPivot. Converting Pivot tables to cube formulas in order to access chart types not supported by Pivot tables. Sam has linked to Robs original post.

I have often used spin controls on spreadsheets to allow users to quickly and easily change inputs that affect charts or spreadsheet results. Cell Matrix has a good set of instructions on How to add an ActiveX SpinButton control to a spreadsheet in Excel 2007.

Microsoft Office 2010

There are some nice new things to get used to in Office 2010. I’m loving and hating Outlook. The conversations are great and painful at the same time.

Thank goodness for Xobni or I think I would go mad trying to find some emails.

I do have two exchange accounts running in Outlook, hence the reason I had to go to the Beta. The good news is the RTM version is now only 2 months away.

I’m running 32bit Office 2010 at the moment. Here are some articles about the differences between 32bit and 64bit.

• Understanding 64bit Office
• Compatibility Between the 32-bit and 64-bit Versions of Office 2010