New blog on Excel '12'

David Gainer has started a blog discussing the next version of Excel. David is the GPM of the Excel team, and this should be a great blog for those of you interested in Excel. https://blogs.msdn.com/excel

In David's first post, he talks about an old limitation in Excel that is being increased. Because of the move to the new file formats, Excel is now able to increase the limit on the number of rows & columns that can exist in a spreadsheet. While the goals and reasons for moving to the new format weren't related to functionality like this, by moving to the new XML formats a whole new world of possibilities opened for us. Dave will discuss in future posts some of the other limitations that are changing. Here's a blurb from David's first post:

Probably the most common question the Excel team gets from our customers is “when are you going to add more rows/more columns/more rows and more columns”. There are many different scenarios behind these requests. Some customers want to be able to analyze more data than Excel has rows, some customers want to track more daily information than Excel has columns, and other customers want to perform matrix math on large matrices of thousands of elements. There are plenty of other scenarios too. Well, the answer to the question is “in Excel 12.” Specifically, the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That’s 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV.  

This is an exciting feature for us, because it is a feature that helps a very broad range of our customers, and we are looking forward to seeing what folks create with a bigger grid.

Of course, rows and columns aren’t the only things customers have been asking for more of. Next time, I will review all of the other places where Excel 12 gives you “more”.

-Brian