You can now properly integrate CRM 2011 with SharePoint online – in other words the SharePoint list component can be installed and configured properly and the previous problem whereby you could not get the SharePoint online server to serve up .htc files which are a vital component of the “seamless” document management experience enjoyed by on-premises customers has been resolved.

This also means by extension that you now use CRM online with SharePoint 2010 online (eg via Office 365) for a totally cloud-based setup. Note this is supported for SharePoint 2007 and 2010, but only 2010 gives the completely integrated look and feel inside CRM.

Thanks to Donna Edwards for tweeting this article by Eric Boocock: CRM Integration with SharePoint online is here

Previous problem is described and documented very well by Jukka Niiranen here: Office 365 launches without Dynamics CRM integration

More information on how to setup SharePoint to work with CRM 2011 is on MSDN:

So I’ve only just got round to finally ordering Documents, Presentations, and Workbooks: Using Microsoft Office to Create Content that gets Noticed which is the updated version.
Not the snappiest of titles, and if it is anything like her last it should have really been called something like “How to make Office 2010 really rock”.

I’m hoping it will be as brilliant and have the same deep content as the previous one, which certainly taught me loads about the packaging and XML structure of the new document formats, as well as some great stuff about using content controls in Word. If I get time I’ll do a proper review when I’ve worked my way through it.

You can now download the whole service pack file as a self-extracting executable and simply run it to install, or you can use Windows Update, where it is listed as an Important/High Priority update (rather than critical or security) for you to manually install (after 90 days this will change to an automatic update if your system is configured for that). At the moment my 32 bit install claims this would take 409 MB via Windows Update compared with only 361 MB for the full exe package download.

Even if you only have 1 machine to do, you will save marginally on the file size if you manually download Office 2010 sp1, and then of course you will have the file to use again on any other machines that need it – if like me you are the de facto IT support for family and friends, this can be quite useful.

A few key changes relating to other products are that Outlook 2010 sp1 will fully support the now-released Office 365 online business applications suite, while SharePoint 2010 will support SQL 2011 and has improved support for users of Internet Explorer 9.

So, there’s lots of information about this important update, as well as the downloads themselves, so let’s dive straight in with a load of links to the things you probably want to get hold of straight away.

Office 2010 information and downloads

KB 2460049 Information page for Office 2010 sp1 + links to downloads
MS Support KB 2460049 Office 2010 SP1

Main Downloads Office 2010 sp1
Office 2010 sp1 – for 32-bit editions of Office
Office 2010 sp1 – for 64-bit editions of Office

SharePoint 2010

Since this is 64 bit only, there’s only one service pack download to consider.
SharePoint 2010 sp1 information
SharePoint 2010 service pack 1 download

System Administrator Information

If you manage many machines and don’t intend to deploy this by actually running the exe file on every computer on your network, you can deploy the update using WSUS, or you can extract the MSP files from the package using a command line and deploy the ones you need.
KB 2532118 has details of which MSP files are in which service pack download

You may also want to find out how to patch those other bits and pieces of the Office suite which are not necessarily part of a core installation, such as Access runtime, Visio viewer or the language packs.
KB 2510609 has details of all the different Office 2010 sp1 packages
KB 2532120 has details of the SharePoint 2010 packages

The Office Sustained Engineering blog has a page with direct links to the download pages for all the different packages for Office 2010 and SharePoint in a big long list arranged alphabetically, with columns for the article with information about that patch, and 32 / 64 bit downloads (as applicable).

There are a few “gotchas” with sp1, most notably for people using SharePoint 2010 and Office Web Apps, and regarding SharePoint workflows on new site collections. This support article is likely to be added to as reports come in of any bugs found once this starts being used around the world, so it may be worth revisiting the page again in a few weeks.
Details of known issue with service pack 1 for Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010

Excel Worksheets of Changes

Another very useful resource for IT administrators and interested geeks is a complete Excel Worksheet (.xlsx) of all the changes, issues fixed etc. While the descriptions of each one are pretty short and usually describe the old symptom (issue) rather than the new behaviour, this could be a useful quick check to see if this service pack will finally fix something odd that your users have been complaining about. There are two files, one for Office 2010 and the other for SharePoint 2010 and Office Servers:
Microsoft Office 2010 Service Pack 1 Changes.xlsx
SharePoint 2010 and Office Servers Service Pack 1 Changes.xlsx

Group Policy files updated

When Office 2010 was released to manufacture, the necessary files for managing the suite using Group Policy and the Office Customisation Tool (OCT) were available at the same time, and with the release of sp1 these tools have also been updated to version 2, which is great news, and certainly an improvement over the delays that were common for Office 2007 and the service packs for that.

There are two versions of the admin files to download, depending on whether you wish to target the 32-bit or 64-bit version of Office – the version you use does not depend on the OS of the server or workstation you are using to manage your Group Policies, so you would use the 32-bit version to mange the users that have 32-bit Office 2010 installed, even if your management console is on Windows 7 64 bit or Windows Server 2008 R2.

Updated admin files for Office 2010 sp1 – ADM/ADMX+ADML and OPAX+OPAL

The same page also has a link to the usual Excel workbook of all the Group Policy and OCT settings reference for Office 2010 but this is just the same old file that has been around since the RTM version, so don’t waste time downloading this. (At the time of writing this blog post the file linked from that page has the same MD5 hash as the one which has been available since at least last August).

The admin files download extracts to three folders for ADM / ADMX and Admin (OCT) files, as well as an updated spreadsheet listing all the settings. So, while this is not as detailed as the full settings reference, it does at least seem to have more settings, although I have not yet found any which are particularly interesting to report.

The Microsoft Office blog has an article about Producer for PowerPoint, as well as links to the download page, and importantly to the Office Animation Runtime which you will need if you have PowerPoint 2010 (previous versions installed this along with the application, whereas 2010 does not). What is strange here is that the download page describes this as version 2 with a release date of 29th April 2011, yet the actual download page and file is identical to the version released and announced at the beginning of May last year.

The previous release was really a bug fix version which sorted out compatibility for Office 2007 and 2010, and there were vague claims that there would be new features in some later release, although as always according to policy there were no specifics about software in development.

Producer is a great way to turn a presentation file into a polished multimedia show which anyone can view using their browser. This is great for e-learning, tutorials, or any situation where you want to take something which would normally be delivered in person and make it available to a wider audience.

Oddly enough the download page refers to this as version 2, but the program itself claims (through help > about) that it is build 3.0.3012.0, but the MD5 hash for this file is identical to the year-old one. I’ve had a couple of problems with it – for example if you delete a load of slides from the timeline it expands the last one to fill up the space, and when you try to shrink it back down it takes while for no obvious reason, in my case chewing up one of my four processor cores flat out for a couple of minutes (tip: only add slides when you know you need them rather than all at once to avoid this problem).

If you have Office 2007

Essentially, if you have Office 2007 installed you will be able to view files created in the newer version since the files for Word, Excel and PowerPoint are the based on the same compressed XML formats. However, if the author of the document has used some of the newer features of Office 2010 you may get mixed results, varying from being able to view but not edit some of the content to missing out on even seeing other parts altogether.

If you have Office 2000, XP or 2003

In order to open files in Office 2007 or 2010 formats you need to get a free add-in known as the Office Compatibility pack. You simply install this on top of your copy of Office and you can start to open files created in Office 2010. If you have the previous version of the compatibility pack you need to get the updated version 4 if you want to be able to read files which contain content created using the newest features. In all cases you will only be able to view the newest content, not necessarily edit all of it, but it is certainly a good start.

If you don’t have MS Office at all

Maybe for whatever reason you don’t have Microsoft Office, or only have Office 97 or older (so can’t use the compatibility pack option). In that case your options are more limited at the moment. To view PowerPoint .pptx files you can download the PowerPoint 2010 viewer,  but for Word and Excel there is not yet a viewer for 2010 files (I’ll post an update when they get released). You can still use the versions for Word 2007 and Excel 2007 (and for the latter you should also download the Excel 2007 viewer Service Pack 2)

What about Visio?

Microsoft Visio is a great program for drawing diagrams of all kinds – office layouts, network topology, wiring schematics, flowcharts, business processes and so on. It is really useful for a range of different departments, but its value is limited if you can’t share the files you have created without having to keep converting everything to PDF or some other common format.

If you have Office 2010 installed with the default settings, you will already have the Visio Viewer, which is good news. This means you can open Visio files or even preview them in the reading pane in Outlook. If you don’t have Office 2010 you can download the free Visio 2010 viewer to achieve the same results. When you open Visio files they will open in Internet Explorer, with a toolbar which gives you access to zoom controls, layers and shape properties (you need to double click a shape once the properties window is open, rather than single click as you would in Visio itself). As well as viewing files you can of course print them out too.

Are you using these file viewers or the compatibility pack? Or are you one of the early adopters using Office 2010 already?

This Technet page has more information including some important details about making sure to reset some of your policies before replacing the ADM files, as you won’t be able to edit them afterwards:

If you have previously configured any of the Group Policy settings affected by this update, you must set those policy settings to their Not Configured state before you remove the previous 2007 Office system ADM files and load the updated version 3 ADM files. This removes the registry key information for the policy setting from the registry. This is because if an .adm file is removed, the settings that correspond to the .adm file do not appear in Group Policy Object Editor; however, the policy settings that are configured from the .adm file remain in the Registry.pol file and continue to apply to the appropriate target client or user. This also applies to any policy settings that you had previously configured that are listed in “Removed settings” later in this article.

You can download the Administrative Templates and OCT in a self-extracting exe file. Included are ADM, ADMX and ADML files in various languages (English, French, Spanish, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean and a couple of flavours of Chinese).

Also has the OPA files and a settings reference, but this other page claims that this is the definitive version of the Office 2007 GP and settings file. I can’t tell the difference – they are the same size and have the same number of rows on the list pages, and have identical MD5 checksums, so they are the same file.

I suspect this was a newer version than the old version in the old download before the newer version superseded the old version so it is now the current version. Clear as mud?

Anyway, most of the focus of these is on fixing a few broken things and targeting settings relating to Open Document format files (making it the default for saving, or blocking it being used at all, that sort of thing.)

Happy policy making!

Well, there’s some information finally coming out about Office 2010 and some of the features we will hopefully be seeing in the final release version next year. As the Technical Preview gets released to an invited audience only at this stage, there aren’t loads of sources of details, but a few places are showing off some interesting ideas and if you watch the videos carefully and look closely at the screenshots there are nuggets to be found.

If you want to be considered for the technical preview yourself, you can still sign up via the “Get a pass” link on the main “launch” site at Office 2010 – the movie. This site started out just hosting a teaser movie but now has a look and feel similar to the new “Backstage” interface which has been added to the Fluent UI to replace the current Office button menu to help you work with different aspects of your document in one place. There are a few videos posted on there right now, no doubt more to come soon.

Where can I find out more?

There are some useful overview documents on the Microsoft PressPass site, including an Office 2010 FAQ which covers a number of things, notably an outline of which products will be included in which versions of the suites available through retail or volume licensing. The oddest thing is that the various press releases available here are all Word .doc documents. Not a universal format like PDF. Not even Microsoft’s own portable format XPS. Not Word 2007 DOCX (probably a good idea not to assume people would already be on board with that, even with the compatibility pack for older versions). Other documents linked from that page give more detail for each of the products individually, but only at a brief marketing level, nothing too technical.

What are the biggest changes?

The most obvious change across the Office system as whole is that all the applications will now have the fluent UI and ribbon, which has also had slight facelift – they have removed many of the borders round buttons, reducing the visual clutter and “flattening” the overall effect (almost exactly what they did in the evolution of the toolbar from Office 97 to 2000). Selected or active options still appear to have borders to make them clearer. When you have additional context-sensitive tabs appearing in the Ribbon, the coloured highlight above them seems to be bolder because it extends from a solid colour at the top of the title bar fading out as it goes down into the Ribbon tabs area, rather than at the moment where this is only visible in the title bar area and fades quickly upwards. This may make the additional tools more obvious to new users when they need them, and help distinguish between similar items by getting used to the colours used.

The other big news items are the introduction of browser-based document viewing and editing (discussed below), and the availability of a 64-bit version of all the products (as well as 32 bit for legacy compatibility). This may provide some speed and productivity benefits to those who have appropriate hardware and OS to take advantage of this, use more memory and so on. Larger Access models might make more sense, but Excel spreadsheets of over 2GB? Hopefully not too often. I do know some people who could probably build PowerPoint shows that big though…

Browser based access? No installation?

Chris Capossela, Senior Vice President of the Office products, did a video for Channel 9 introducing Office 2010, and a lot of emphasis on this idea of Office everywhere for more flexible collaboration, which he described as

The best productivity software for the PC, the phone and the browser

The concept of being able to access your work equally from anywhere is a pretty powerful shift in emphasis (can I use the phrase “new paradigm” without irony?) So you could use the full application on a powerful Windows box, a browser on any machine (including non-windows devices if the support for Firefox and Safari works out), or even a phone (not clear if this needs to be a Windows mobile device, or any web-capable smartphone, although Chris talks about new version of Office Mobile, so it seems like the former).

From what we have seen there will of course be some limitations in the available functionality. This screenshot of editing a Word document in a browser is quite revealing, just in the sheer lack of tabs across the Ribbon gives some indication of the reduced functionality. As to whether this will really deliver value to customers remains to be seen. I am sure there are times when someone just needs to proof-read and edit the text without adding lots of other rich content, or check a spreadsheet to simply update their sales forecast figures. But there are many other times when adding that video to a PowerPoint slide deck for tomorrow’s pitch, or actually using Excel to do some real analysis are quite important too.

Of course, the fundamental layer to all this is not the desktop products (clearly, since the whole point is that you don’t need them), but rather the place you store your documents. This could be “in the cloud” using Office Live online services, or on one of your enterprise Sharepoint 2010 document libraries. This may be the compelling reason that finally encourages more corporates to move to Sharepoint. The ability to control access, do version control, manage document production workflows, check documents in and out to use offline copies safely, store metadata and index things for almost-instant search have not been enough for some IT managers to buy into the idea. Corporate governance legislation, e-discovery risks and other factors are already pushing better document management onto the agenda in many boardrooms. The added convenience of access from anywhere might be an additional factor which makes the decision easier.

There will still be a cost implication for both the Sharepoint installation (or some kind of SaS or SaaS subscription) and some kind of user licence for Office 2010. Pricing has not been released for any products in the suite at the moment, but partners are being reassured that the online model will not affect their revenue streams as companies will still have to buy licences, so the general principle seems clear, and may be more like the CALs associated with server products traditionally. However, some 400 Million existing users of Office Live and skydrive will have access to these Office web apps for free from the final date of release, so it’s not clear how this fits with the previous statement.

Added features in Office 2010 suite products

Over the next few days I’ll be looking at each of the products in the suite in turn and discussing some of the most important new features we will be looking forward to.

Other products in Office System 2010

The Office “system” includes desktop products like Visio and Project even though they are sold separately and not as part of any of the suites. These are getting the Ribbon just like the rest of the Office system, as is Sharepoint Workspace 2010 (the new name for Groove).

Another flavour of Visio is coming

There is a third product entering the Visio line up – “Visio Premium”. The old Visio Enterprise was discontinued some time ago taking the choice down to two (standard and professional), which meant the loss of some pretty useful features for connecting to and diagramming active directory domains and Exchange organisations. There’s more emphasis in Visio 2010 for connecting to live data sources (rather than just drawing pictures), and closer integration with Sharepoint, as with the rest of the Office system. According to the press release:

Visio Premium 2010, introduced this year, offers advanced diagramming capabilities for IT and Process management, including new templates for Business Process Management Notations (BPMN), The Microsoft Accelerator for Six Sigma and SharePoint Workflow; new process management tools such as subprocess to help with standardization and reuse; and rules and logic validation to ensure accuracy and consistency across the organization. In addition, SharePoint workflows developed in Visio 2010 Premium can be exported for execution and real-time monitoring on Microsoft SharePoint Server 2010.

Visio guy has started posting about some of the new features in Visio 2010 and Sharepoint, and I am sure he will have more to say about these features in due course.

What are the best features you have seen announced? What would you like to see in the new suite?

I already mentioned the lack of file open icon, and previously I have talked about the ridiculous blob. And the initial flashing they had to incorporate to tell us its a button. But when you actually get closer it just gets sillier – I really wouldn’t have thought that was possible!

When you click and look, if you decide to cancel and move to the traditional cancel location (lower right) and click that button, does it close the file open dialog/ribbon? Or does it close Excel?

Everyone I have asked (and me) has accidentally closed Excel numerous times before eventually learning that this particular piece of the interface is not ‘normal’. In fact to cancel that thing you click anywhere else in Excel – and Excel ignores the click but closes the dialog! How ridiculous is that?

They have created a thing that is not as powerful or controllable as a dialog, but is too big and intrusive to be a menu or toolbar so they butchered an existing UI concept – the click away to cancel menu concept to work with this quasi dialog. But dialogs never worked like that before or in other applications. So now Office is the most friction-full application in the widows world (excluding perhaps Ulead products).

So, does the Office button bring up a (poor) dialog, or is it just a menu?

Sorry Simon but I have to disagree with you on this one (I seem to recall being told I was the voice of balance on smurfonspreadsheets by someone…).

Just because you think it’s a dialogue and call it a dialogue does not mean it is a dialog or should behave like one. Shredding a straw man / ribbon does not make a valid argument. To me it looks and behaves pretty much like I would expect a menu to behave:

• It appears from a button above it, and remains in that fixed position (unlike normal dialog which are windows which can be moved about).
• It has items which when hovered over reveal sub-menus of related items. The ones which do this are correctly indicated with a small arrow to the right.
• Since it is not a dialogue, it has no "X" close button in the window title bar because it does not have a title bar. (as an aside, I would wager this is just as popular a method of closing an unwanted dialogue as going for the Cancel button)

Why would I expect a Cancel button on a menu anyway?

Well, I wouldn’t. But even if I did, I would look for it specifically – the cancel button is not always in the bottom right of a dialog (nor always there at all). However, I do find that the Cancel button is usually the one labelled "Cancel" rather than the one labelled "Print" or "Exit Excel". This principle has stood me in good stead with most applications.

Anyone familiar with the old file menu and expecting things to be the same or similar in the new version would not be at all surprised to find that the option to exit the application was the last one in this list, I would have thought.

Fair enough, it’s not a regular, old style menu

A couple of ways this does not behave like a regular menu in the traditional standard interface design we have all come to love (or at least get very very used to):

• The “recent documents” list appears in the right hand half when the left hand menu does not require a submenu, rather than extending the menu to ridiculous lengths (especially if you crank up the setting to show the maximum of 50). Unusual? Non-(old)-standard? Sure, but you have to admit it’s useful, makes good sense and requires less mouse travel. And who does not love the ability to pin documents to the recent list by the way?
• yes, some of the menu items (such as Save As) have something like that weird dual-purpose behaviour where you can click the button and you get something very like it used to be, or you can hover and move to the right for the submenu. But these are better than the similar behaviour of split buttons on the ribbon in a big way – you only have to hover to immediately discover the submenu, unlike the buttons where you have to click one half or the other to see what is going on.
  The only menu item where this actually makes any difference is Save As. You click the left half and the SaveAs dialog is presented with the current saved workbook format selected (or .xlsx for a new unsaved workbook or some other default if you have a group policy in force to keep people in compatibility mode for some reason). A click in the right brings up the same box with the chosen format selected. Big deal. (The Print menu has print as an option on the right too, and no discernible difference to me which you choose to click on, so although it has the dual-control thing there is no downside to the user if they don’t understand it).

For me the only behaviour which is odd enough (in that it is unexpected for a normal menu) to warrant special mention on my Excel 2007 or Office 2007 update training courses is that the menu items can be added to the QAT with a right click, thus proving that they are buttons, this is therefore a dialog not a menu and Simon was right after all! Well, up to a point…

Should File actions be mixed with application Options?

As for “Excel Options” (or Word, PowerPoint etc. options) being out of place in here when everything else is “file” stuff, the same could be said for Options being on the Tools menu historically when everything else there was to do with content (of a spreadsheet or document or whatever) – like spelling checker, track changes or Goal Seek. It was never intuitive in the first place, we just got so used to it over time that anything seems weird (like non-Qwerty keyboards). Other application authors had options (or preferences) on the file menu years ago (Jasc Paint Shop Pro being one example I know of) or put it somewhere else such as the Edit menu. I don’t use Acrobat reader anymore, but I’m pretty sure Adobe put the preferences on the edit menu, which actually sounds right when you want to edit your preferences for the application, but never felt right because I was not editing anything in the usual sense.

I find that people quickly grasp the idea that anything to do with the whole document or whole application is on the Office button. It’s (sort of) a separation of content editing tools (on the Ribbon) and meta-tools (on the Office button).

What about other “whole document” options like Page Setup?

Arguably, Page Setup could have been left there for most people’s purposes (and Print Area in Excel), but they make good sense on the Page Layout ribbon, especially since they can differ from sheet to sheet in Excel or section to section in Word (thus failing my “whole document” test).

I actually prefer the visibility of the options on the Ribbon, especially Scale to Fit – how many times have you wasted a trip to the Page Setup dialog only to find the “fit to 1 page” option you wanted was already set. Now you see it before you go there. And having a true “Automatic” setting rather than a kludge of putting in more pages than you ever expected to need, (which worked until some twit turned on borders for a huge cell range or even the whole sheet). Now I just want the current margins to be obvious, and ideally adjustable from the Ribbon rather than another dialog – “Last custom setting” that I used is not the same as what is current for this document. Especially since Page Setup is one of the few dialogs which is still modal so I have to click OK, find out if everything now fits and wraps where I want it and try again.

To me it would also have made some sense to include other “whole file” operations such as Protect Workbook and Share Workbook on the Office button menu in Excel (maybe in the Prepare sub-menu) as well as on the Review tab of the Ribbon, in order to provide more discoverability? I think it makes as much sense as the Restrict Permission options being there, making it really easy for users to discover that they can’t use this feature without jumping through hoops or having a clued-up IT department to sort out certificate goodies for them.

What would you like to see on the Office button menu? Or on the Ribbon in general?

Styles in Excel are one of those things that sound good in theory, but are significantly worse than useless in reality. In an isolated world they may work but as soon as you start copying a pasting between workbooks…then you get a right royal style mess.

Cell styles as a concept seem pretty weak to me. The built-in ones are hopeless; I know hardly anyone (actually no-one that I could name right now) that uses them.

I have recently done some extensive work for a client on a set of templates, themes, etc for the whole Office suite. For the Excel templates I included some cell styles to make it quick to format things in “corporate” colours for headings and so on (as well as default table styles for the same reason). This provides user convenience and helps them create more consistent documents with more of a “branded” feel to them.

As to imposing a regime of “pink means bad” and “orange double underline means linked” (linked to what?), no chance.

Why styles don’t address the real need for good formatting

I teach students on my Excel training courses that formatting of spreadsheets should be used for three purposes:

• to highlight (data outliers; estimates as opposed to actuals)
• to group or associate data together (months in the same quarter or year having a light shaded background say, next group no background; using matching colour for axes and lines in a two-series chart with two different scales)
• to separate data by category or type (line above the first month of a new year; making the title row bold)

These principles of using formats to help interpret the data, rather than help it look pretty tend to get people focussed on the task rather than the appearance. The built-in cell styles only seem to address the concept of highlighting, rather than being useful for grouping or separating. The highlighting they provide seems arbitrary at best, and quite likely to cause headaches with some of the colours involved.

They also apply too aggressively for my liking. For example, if I apply a format to a cell to show that it is an estimate, and someone else wants to style it to say it should be checked (or updated or whatever), my original formatting is irrecoverably lost. Resetting the cell style to “normal” simply applies this instead. By using precise formatting I could control this better – for example my estimates might be indicated by use of italics and a different font colour. I could then highlight this cell to be checked by adding a border or background fill, which can be separately removed later once done, leaving my original font format in place. Or I can change the format to represent an actual rather than estimate figure, but still leave the border to make sure it gets checked.

Cell styles are all-or-nothing, and that does not work for me.

Surely styles help people apply formatting more quickly?

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not for people formatting everything by hand, one property at a time. Paragraph styles are a great way to format Word documents (the only sensible way for a consistent approach to layout and formatting). How a document is structured and how it looks are closely tied together, and providing users with an easy way to show heading hierarchies, properly legal-numbered lists and so on is really valuable, and saves a ton of time versus bold, italic, indent-a-bit, font size 24 etc. Re-using the hierarchical structure this gives for things like table of contents or an outline make good sense too. Marketing departments typically like templates as a convenient way to give end users some built-in branding and good design, making it easier for everyone to create documents which look similar, and meet the guidelines they have chosen for colours, layouts, even choice of bullet points. I just can’t see how this sort of model translates to Excel.

Colour schemes do make sense to help “brand” Excel documents with corporate colours for headings and the like, and to make sure that visual elements such as charts or diagrams have a sensible and consistent palette (not necessarily in corporate colours, which may be too saturated or distinctive in many cases).

Cell styles don’t seem to meet any actual need that is not just as well addressed for the majority of users by the format painter tool, and learning to use it properly – I have lost count of the people I see on intermediate or advanced courses who have never double clicked this to lock it on and apply a format to multiple targets, whether in Excel, Word or PowerPoint

Workbooks that have lived for a while in 2003 and been reformatted over time seem to generate loads of horrid pointless cell styles when converted to 2007 (equally PowerPoint files create large numbers of colour schemes so that existing slides can retain their colours while still pretending to be theme-aware). Copying sheets between workbooks seems to compound this (although because I hardly even look at the styles gallery it is hard to know exactly how bad this gets). The style gallery quickly becomes useless, and as Simon highlights, it is tedious beyond belief to sort out. Some kind of proper style manager interface might redeem this. I tend to crack open the zip file and reach for Notepad++ for some XML-hacking – not what I would expect most users to do, or even many power users.

Styles gallery is a waste of space – literally

My biggest gripe with cell styles is that for a feature which is very rarely used it gets given a lot of space. Right now my ribbon is maxed out on my 1920×1200 widescreen. The Home ribbon is 47cm wide, and the styles gallery is showing 10 items in 5 columns taking up 15 cm – nearly a third of the ribbon. The same space could show various groups which many people might find more useful, any of these pairs would fit in the same space or less:

• names and formula auditing
• page setup and scale to fit
• changes (protection) and workbook views

I know some things have been made more prominent on the ribbon to get people to consider features they did not even know were there – conditional formatting and defined names being two of the most underused in my opinion, and I’m very glad to see them given a useful amount of space. But getting people to use cell styles simply won’t set the world on fire, or make spreadsheets more efficient, or easier to maintain, or less prone to user errors. If anything, they distract from good practice and promote eye-candy – will “death by PowerPoint” spread to “death by spreadsheet”?

What can you do to change many cells at once by a specific amount?

A few approaches spring to mind, depending on the scale of the problem and the structure of your data.

1 – Write a macro

You could create a macro to go to all the relevant cells and change them by the appropriate amount (multiply by 115/117.5 in our case). But you can’t change historical cells, and you shouldn’t change any values too far into the future (the new rate only applies for one year it seems). So for every worksheet of every workbook you need to make sure you only apply your wonder macro to the right cells.

Sounds like a lot of effort to me, and too open to risk of changing values you should not (and possibly without any audit trail), but the up-front investment of time might pay off if you had loads of identical sheets to run it on.

2 – Use temporary formulas and paste special (values)

Easy enough – in an unused column or row, create a formula to calculate the right values from the original data (eg =A1*115/117.5). Copy this down (or across) to build a new range of corrected data. Copy all these cells then use edit > paste special > values to paste this over the original data.

Not bad, but laborious, and if you have lots of separate ranges to do this could take a while.

3 – Use paste special on its own

About 90% of people I meet when doing training courses have only ever used Paste Special to copy values without the formats and formulas; it’s like the rest of the dialogue box is just a blur. This is even worse in Excel 2007′s ribbon, where you use the drop-down arrow under the Paste button and choose Paste Special Values directly without ever seeing the full range of options. I like that the frequently-used option is even quicker to find and use now, but wonder if some people won’t ever discover the rich set of options they could be using. This technique will utilise one of the lesser used options of paste special.

Find a single unused cell in your spreadsheet and put in the correction factor – a formula such as =115/117.5 would be great for our purposes (0.978723 to be precise). Now copy that cell (CTRL-C). While that selection is still copied (showing the “marching ants” border round it), select some of the cells you want to change and go to edit > paste special (or use the drop down under the Paste button in Excel 2007).

Now choose one of those options you usually ignore – multiply. Click OK and hey presto! The target cells are all multiplied by the source multiplicand. Even better – it is still selected as a copy source, so you can just go find your next range and select that and paste special > multiply again. And again, and switch to the next worksheet in your workbook and do it some more.

For the keyboard lovers out there, the easiest way to get to paste special is Alt then E, S, then M (for multiply) and Enter for the OK button. So, copy the source cell, select your target, Alt, E, S, M, Enter. This will still take a while, but I think it could turn out to be the most efficient in terms of actual clicks, and it is all undo-able one step (pasted range) at a time if you click on the wrong thing at any point.

Differences between versions

If you use this Paste Special > Multiply function (or similar ones such as divide, add etc) you should be aware that the different versions of Excel achieve this in slightly different ways. In all cases any formula in your target cells will be preserved, but numbers may get overwritten or not, depending on the source cells and your version of Excel.

In all versions that I have available to test*, if both source and target contain just numeric values (no formulas) then it calculates the result and pastes this straight in. In Excel 2007 if the destination you paste over had a formula in to start with it writes in a new formula to do the multiplication, using the value of the source cell, but it never creates a formula because the source cell had one, it always uses the resulting value from there.

Using Excel 2000 and 2003, if either the source or destination cells have a formula in then in it builds a formula in your target cell to do the calculation without asking. So if you use the formula =115/117.5 to get your multiplier, then this forces Excel 2000/2003 to create formulas in the target cells even if they only had plain numbers in them, which you may not want. You could be better off using the explicit value 0.978723 so that it will only create formulas if it needs to. Alternatively, select “values” as well as “multiply” to force it to use the result from the source cell, rather than the cell contents as a formula (so the key sequence becomes Alt, E, S, V, M, Enter).

*I don’t have Excel 2002 / XP, but I am pretty sure it will be identical to 2000 and 2003 since it comes between those versions

Warning!

OK, nothing is perfect. When you use this feature of paste special, blank cells are replaced with 0 (zero). Ticking the “skip blanks” option has no effect, it multiplies the implied zero by our number to give a zero result.

Why does this matter? Well, it might not matter if you select specific cell regions, but if you select whole rows or columns at a time, you will get all zeroes to the end / bottom which may not be ideal – it may try to print pages with these on, for example, if you have page layout settings such as “1 page wide x 20 pages tall”, and you were relying on the fact that it never prints past page 12 if everything below there is blank.

Similarly if the blank cells are part of a range which you calculate average values from, these cells will now be counted even though they do not contribute to the sum (so if you previously had 117.5, BLANK, 117.5, BLANK you would now have 115, 0, 115, 0. Your AVERAGE will have shifted from 117.5 (=sum of 235 divided by count of 2) to 57.5 (=sum of 230 divided by count of 4). Other functions such as SMALL, COUNT etc may be distorted by having lots of zeroes to include where previously there were blank cells to ignore. If you are not using such summary functions, or do not have blank cells in the regions you are changing, then there is no problem.

Formatting considerations

You are multiplying a number (our VAT fixing factor of 0.978723) with several decimal places by another number with probably a couple (if your values have pence / cents  / etc). The result will therefore have even more decimal places – anything up to eight, potentially (where you are multiplying 3 one millionths by some number of hundredths). If your cells are already formatting as “Number” with an explicit number of decimal places showing, that will be retained and everything will be fine. If the target cells are formatted as General (but just happen to have two decimal places on their values) your new result will have lots more.

So you will probably have to re-format your target cells either before or after the exercise of multiplying them out (leave the source cell showing its full decimal value). If you are happy to keep the underlying precision of the new calculated numbers, then I would suggest reformatting afterwards so you can see which ones you have done.

Whether your cells are already formatted to two decimals, or you do this afterwards, Excel will as always be storing the actual, detailed, tiny decimals underneath. This could be seen as more accurate, but can make sums appear to be incorrect due to rounding errors. So what if you don’t want that? Read on…

Precision as Displayed

If you turn on “precision as displayed” then whenever Excel performs a calculation, it looks at the format for the cell, displays what you are expecting, and then throws away any additional detail that it is not showing you. Yes, throws it away, discards it, gone for ever. Use this option with extreme caution. Luckily it is a per-workbook thing so this will not affect other files you work on, and it will persist with the file you use it on when other people open it.

So – step one, format your cells to display what you need (probably two decimal places). To turn on the option you want:

• Excel 2000 / 2002 / 2003 go to Tools > Options > Calculation > tick “precision as displayed”, then OK, then OK to acknowledge the warning.
• Excel 2007 go to Office button > Excel options > Advanced > calculation (scroll way down) > tick “precision as displayed”, then OK to acknowledge the warning, then OK to save the settings

Now when you do any calculations in this workbook, what you see is what is stored – but there’s no going back to get more detail out, so make really sure your display formats are what you want before you start.

A better way

No, not a better way to fix it if you already have a problem, but a potentially better way to build your spreadsheets in future:

Create a named range called VATRate (VAT is too short a name for Excel 2007 since there is a column of that name, and everything else up to XFD, but older versions such as Excel 2003 would be fine with it). Don’t put a cell reference in there, just put our formula “=115/117.5″ or just =0.978723 directly. Now we can use this name wherever we like and at any later date just update the formula in one place – our named range. When you build any formulas that calculate out a value including VAT, refer to this named range as part of your formula. Eg, C27=A1*B27*VATRate.