Note: This is a not an Excel tips post. It is a diary of one of the most awesome conferences I have ever attended.
I just finished attending PASS Business Analytics conference in Santa Clara (USA) and am now heading back home to India. And it has been one of the most fun, uplifting and educational experiences of my life. I met so many remarkable people in this trip.
Just to name a few, I met Dan Fylstra (one of the pioneers of VisiCalc & founder of Solver), Bob Phillips, Ken Puls, Jordan Goldmeier, Oz Du Soliel, Rick Grantham, Szilvia Juhasz, Zack Baresse, Kevin Jones, Avi Singh, Chris Webb, Rob Collie, Bill Jelen, Scott Senkeresty, Matt Allington, Jon Acampora, Marco Russo & Jen Stirrup.
I also felt fortunate to meet many of Chandoo.org fans, followers, customers & supporters who attended the conference. It was non stop fun for 3 days.
As if meeting all these great people, sharing a conversation, beer, snack, moment or ride (in a cramped backseat with 2 other Excel MVPs) with them was not enough, I also got to attend few of the amazing sessions at PASS BA.
- I learned CUBE formulas from Bob Phillips
- Introduction to R from Jen Stirrup
- Power Query trickery from Chris Webb
- Charting best practices from Jordan
- Keynote presentations by Mico & Carlo
I wish I had the time to attend more sessions. But I was busy teaching a few or meeting people.
All in all, in one word, PASS Business Conference has been AWESOME.
Couple of funny & interesting experiences from the conference:
5 MVPs in a car
At the end of day 3 (April 22nd), a bunch of us were sitting at the hotel lobby bar and chatting. When I asked Ken (Excelguru) what they are doing for dinner, Ken said Zack is taking him for dinner. Then Zack looked at me and said, “why don’t you tag along?”
By then we were 4 people – Ken, Zack, Wessex Bob & myself.
We all agreed to head back to rooms, fresh up & meet downstairs in 20 minutes.
When we all came down, Jordan was also at the bar area. So we asked him to join us.
Jordan, Bob & I shared the backseat and lots of laughs all the way to some upscale sea food restaurant in another suburb of San Francisco.
Here is a selfies from backseat of Zack’s car.
Bob, Jordan & Chandoo
We meet Kevin Jones there and we all share really amazing food, insightful (often hilarious) conversation. As Ken recently quit his job to be self-employed, we all shared our words of wisdom with him.
But the night is not over yet
We reached the hotel at 9:30. I find Rob, Scott, Matt, few members from Microsoft Excel & Power BI teams all having drinks at the lobby bar. So I joined them for more laughs, conversation & selfies.
Here is a pic with Rob, Scott, Matt & Ken
Chandoo, Rob, Matt, Scott & Ken
By the time I head to my room it was 11:30 PM.
Dany’s Recalc or Die stricker
Dany Hoter from Excel team has this cool laptop sticker.
Almost all the Excel MVPs at the conference in one epic pic
And here it is:
Zack, Jon, Bob, Ken, Chris, Marco, Gregory
Cat, Oz, Chandoo, Rick & Szilvia
My first impressions of everyone
This is the first time I met so many Excel MVPs & bloggers. Here is the first thought that came to me when I saw them.
- Ken: He is big!!! and he talks fast
- Oz: What a hat! and whats with the Sriracha hot sauce?!?
- Rick: he means business
- Dan Fylstra: Wow, he is so cool & down to earth
- Scott: Boy his laughter is really loud
- Avi: small packet of energy & enthusiasm
- Bob: funny and awesomely English
Thank you PASS & everyone who showed up
Thanks a lot to the PASS team for inviting me to this conference. I had an awesome time.
Also thanks to everyone from Chandoo.org community who signed up for this event & made it even more awesome. Thank you.
24 Responses to “10 Supercool UI Improvements in Excel 2010”
The best improvement by far is the Collapse Ribbon ^ button !
Kind of a shame that some of the best improvements are actually returns to old functionality. One thing I don't like is that to get to recent files I need to do an extra click after File - apart from Save As, that's why I'm usually in the File menu. I like the sparkline options, though they are still as not fully featured as some of the free and pay options out there.
The collapse button for the ribbon menu is good news. Can you make the ribbon menus stick too?
Nine improvements, not ten. You can also select multiple objects in 2007. Click on the Find & Select item at the far right of the Home tab, and the dropdown looks remarkably like your 2010 screenshot.
@Jon.. Thank you. Dumb me, I somehow thought we couldnt select objects in Excel 2007. Just saw the "select menu" and it is there. I have corrected the post and removed the point. I have added the "you can make your own ribbons" instead. Thanks once again.
@Arti: what do you mean by make ribbons stick?
@Alex: May be it is my installation, but when I go to "File menu" I see "recent files" by default.
For example, if I am working with one of the contextual ribbon menus (Pivot tables, Drawing/Chart etc), as soon as I click away from the selected object, the menu tabs vanish. If I click on the object again immediately, then Excel will remember what I was looking at, but if I wander away and click on a Pivot, then back again on the Chart, the menus will 'appear' but not get activated, thereby causing much annoyance and additional clicking.
I want to "pin" the whole menu (not invididual commands) somehow, so that I can have the menu there for the length of the time I am working with graphics. Excel 2003 used to have the Drawing toolbar you could detach and hover while you were working, but this functionality disappeared in Excel 2007.
My thought was Excel should just allow a 'pin', similar to the Recently Opened files menu, for the Ribbon Menus as well. If I have not selected any Drawing object, the commands can be greyed out, but I want the menu as a whole to 'stick'.
@Arti... I think MS solved this problem differently. When I select a pivot and go to "design" tab Excel 2010 remembers this and automatically takes me to "design" tab when I reselect the pivot.
Apart from this you can also define your own ribbon with all the things you normally do. See the above article (I have added this after Jon's comments)
Nice feature. About time for a upgrade for MS Office
Oh... okay. That might be a start. I'd probably just copy-paste the Drawing tab haha. Thanks. I'll definitely give Excel 2010 a try.
Btw - have you considered getting into / gotten into the world of Excel as it meets SharePoint?
Actually, the replacement new thing is probably better than all the rest. One thing that the designers of the Office 2007 ignored was allowing regular users to customize their own interface. Office 2010's interface was expanded in this way to address the huge uproar.
Is there still a limit on how many things you can add to the QAT bar? (I'm too lazy to look myself.)
@Jeff.. it seems to take quite a few, but only shows one line and gives a little arrow button at the end. (summary: shucks!)
The best thing is you can edit the ribbon directly from excel, so now i can create my own bar with just the things I use regularly!
One of the annoying things in 07 for me is the Add-Ins menu bar - in 03 I could keystroke directly to menu add ins.. In 07 I needed an extra keystroke just to activate the add-in menu, then the keystrokes as normal.. Hope this marek sense..
John -
If you remember the old Excel 2003 Alt-key shortcuts, you can still use them in 2007. To get to the Add-In dialog:
Alt-T-I
Dear Arti & Chandoo
Seen your comments over some issues. Hope you are form India, gone through your comment expecting a pin to command it as a whole, great, hope if someone out of MS have read it, it may be kept in mind while the next R & D of Office Ver. 16
Just incase someone forgot CTRL+F1 will collapse the ribbon.
[...] was pleasantly surprised when I ran Microsoft Excel 2010 for first time. It felt smooth, fast, responsive and looked great on my [...]
I like the sparklines, and the ability to modify the charts
How do you get rid of the advertisment on the right hand side? If you upgrade then will it take off the ads?
Once again Microsoft has re-decorated the Office and we are NOT pleased!
The graphics object selector can be found in the Home ribbon under Find & Select, Select Objects near the bottom of the drop down. You can make it part of the Quick Access toolbar by right click over it and selecting Add to Quick Access toolbar.
The graphics "cursor" will now appear on the mini-toolbar at the top left of the window.
How to get rid of "Add-Ins" button in Backstage (File)" menu by means of XML code, i.e. to hide, to delete or to disable this button?
This button is usually situated in the Backstage menu between "Help" and "Options" buttons.
Vladimir, did you ever get an answer to your question?
I am tying to customize the ribbon UI for a file using XML, and this is precisely the piece I can't figure out. I can hide other tabs, remove items from QAT and backstage - all except the options that are showing up under add-ins in backstage. If there is an XML syntax for referencing this thing and making it invisible, I cannot find it.
Hey, nice tutorial. Please check my video tutorial on similar topic at the below link and provide your comments:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeIFc0jYjpA