The Excel Community, Updates and UserVoice

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Excel Blog articles.

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I wanted to use my first blog post in the community to introduce myself.

 

My name is Olaf Hubel, I joined the Excel team last January. I came from the Office 365 team and before that the SharePoint team. In my free time, I spent most hours playing with my kids and gadgets. Currently working on a robot arm project with my daughter. IoT and Home Automation are my two big passions.

 

Currently I am the Excel community lead in the Excel PM team, but I also work on things like UserVoice, Blogs and have a strong passion for Excel and Power Bi better together.  

 

I am so excited about the possibilities of this community and what is yet to come. This will be the place where we as a community can share best practices, have AMA’s, fun competitions, …  A place for Excel users to share things with each other, to engage with the engineering team our MVP’s and to find all the links to resources they need.

 

I also wanted to let you know about all the work we have been doing. UserVoice is a site we use to capture feature request from our users. Over the last couple of months, we have released lots of small and big updates, many of them our users requested on UserVoice. For example if you like to see the full list for Excel Desktop.

 

It is important to note that those updates or new features are released in stages. Most of the items mentioned below are currently in the Insiders stage (see here if you like to join). They will slowly rollout to production for our office 365 subscribers.

 

Some of the completed work based on UserVoice feedback

  • Lots of performance improvements and bug fixes
  • Performance improvements when Excel is connected to SSAS.
  • The ability to turn off time grouping from the UI was recently added to the O365 version of Excel
  • Excel will support a newCSV format using UTF-8 encoding
  • Pinned files are now sorted alphabetically
  • New preference in the Options dialog to allow you to make the pen select instead of ink by default
  • You should no longer get a warning dialog about data loss when saving a file asCSV
  • Introduced theSWITCH function to Office 365 subscribers
  • Excel will warn about the mismatch between the file extension andHTML content, but will now open the workbook in Protected View as an additional layer of security.
  • OData and PowerPivot no longer removes separator on actual billable hours
  • Completed adding new =CONCATand =TEXTJOIN functions to Excel 2016
  • 32-bit Excel 2016 build 16.0.6868.2060 onwards is enabled for Large Address Aware. This will allow 32-bit Excel 2016 to consume beyond 2 GB virtual memory
  • ReleasedMAXIFS and MINIFS to Excel as part of Office 365

 

Some of the new features in the November 2016 Update

 

 

maps.pngNew map charts

You can create a map chart to compare values and show categories across geographical regions. Use it when you have geographical regions in your data, like countries/regions, states, counties or postal codes. Watch a quick map chart video here.

 

New icons available on the Insert tab

Need to insert an icon that conveys a certain idea or concept, but you don't want to draw it yourself? Check out the Iconbutton on the Insert Choose a category like people, technology, or sports. Then click the icon that represents the idea or concept you have in mind.

 

Quickly save to recent folders

This feature was highly requested by our customers: Go to File > Save As > Recent, and you’ll see a list of recently accessed folders that you can save to.

 

Accessibility improvements

We now have improved support for Narrator and other assistive technology that lets you read cells, create tables, sort data, and more. See What's new in accessibility for Excel for more information.

 

Thanks,

 

Olaf

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