Report from Microsoft

Awesome. I spent a few days at Microsoft this week, at the Microsoft MVP Summit. This is a great opportunity for me to see what is coming in Excel 14 and Excel 15. Now, unfortunately, I am under NDA, so I can't tell you what I've seen. HOWEVER, I can point you to a public video that will give you a teaser of two things that Microsoft has planned.

1) Pivot table fans: Are you ever frustrated with the Page Filters? In Excel 2007, you can open the page filter and select multiple items. However, the resulting pivot table now shows a heading of "Multiple Items". This is rather confusing, because when you print the report, you don't know what items are selected.

If you've had this frustration, open the following video and grab the scrollbar and fast forward to the 1 hour and 32 minute mark. You will see something that the presenter describes as "slicers" - they seem to be a visual layout of the old Page Field area.

http://tinyurl.com/cssvcj

2) In the same video, at the 1 hour and 27 minute mark, Donald Farmer talks about a new Excel add-in called Gemini. This is the awesome part. In the video, Donald mashes up a 20 million row data set with data that he downloaded from the web. The resulting Gemini-based pivot table allows you to easily join the data on the two worksheets and create a pivot table. This is a very exciting product for those of you doing business intelligence work in Excel.

There is a lot more that I learned this week, but again, it is all under NDA. Until I can find where Microsoft says it publicly, I will have to keep that under wraps. Gemini promises to make Excel 2010 a very compelling upgrade. Stay tuned. I will let you know when a beta becomes available.