The software giant is currently preparing final milestone builds of Office 15 in preparation for a full beta in late January, according to sources familiar with the company’s plans. Microsoft Office 15, the codename for the next version of Microsoft’s popular productivity suite, is tentatively scheduled for a beta 1 milestone in late January. Microsoft will provide a Technology Preview of the software initially, expected at CES 2012 alongside the Windows 8 beta.

That didn't happen.

Office 15 will be designed with touch at the heart of the applications. Microsoft has redesigned the general look and feel of its popular Outlook email client to make it usable by touch, pen and mouse… Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer confirmed in September that the company is preparing a Metro style version of Office. You ought to expect that we are rethinking and working hard on what it would mean to do Office Metro style,” said Ballmer

One recruitment professional claims to have identified the secret of eternal employability in financial services: advanced Excel skills.

“There is always steady demand for people with advanced Excel,” says Dominic Connor at P&D Quant Recruitment. “It is an excellent safety net for when it hits the pan.”

Using Excel to ensure employability means familiarising yourself with pivot tables, VBA, importing and exporting data from SQL servers and more complex elements like DDE (dynamic data exchange strings).

And this:

The great joy of all this is that it’s easy to learn, argues Connor. “All you need to do is to buy a book by Walkenbach and work your way through from beginning to end,” he suggests, “The joy of Excel is that everyone knows how to do it, but not many people know how to do it properly.”

Answer: I have no idea. I suppose I could dig out all my old royalty statements (which are on paper), spend a day doing data entry, and come up with a total. But that's way too much work.

Then I remembered that Amazon provides data from BookScan for authors. The only data available is for the past eight weeks:

That's 7,367 books sold in 56 days, which works out to an average of 131.6 per day. I've been writing books for about 18 years, but sales weren't always as good as they currently are -- although they have also been much better. So let's assume 100 books per day for 18 years. That's 675,000 books.

The Spreadsheet Day blog celebrates the joy and challenges of working with spreadsheets. October 17th was voted the best day for Spreadsheet Day, because VisiCalc, the first spreadsheet for personal computers, was released on October 17th, 1979.

Please celebrate responsibly.

Then it occurred to me that the Power Utility Pak coupon in my books are just as inconvenient. So here's a deal that's valid for the next seven days.

If you own one of my books, and would like a discounted price on PUP v7.1 (for Excel 2007 and later) or PUP v6 (for Excel 2003):

Send me an email with the subject "PUP COUPON" and tell me:

1. Which book you have
2. The version of PUP you want
3. The price shown on the coupon in the back of the book
4. The first word on Page 100.

If your email passes my rigorous proof of purchase test, I'll reply with a URL where you can make a credit card payment online (or, use Paypal if you prefer). When the payment is processed, I'll send you download instructions.

The famous connoisseur Jim Murray said of the 1974 Ardbeg Provenance: "This is the finest whisky I have ever tasted. As close to perfection as makes no difference."

Ever notice that every once in a while, something comes along in which it seems heaven, earth and the stars were aligned? It's as if all of the ingredients came together to create something so amazing, it's hard to imagine it could ever be matched.

Microsoft Excel is IT's answer to the 1974 Ardbeg Provenance

I felt this way when I used Microsoft Excel in 1996. At the time I was a geologist responsible for accurately steering an oil drilling bit 3,000 meters below the surface of a Montana farm field.

With Excel and the magical help of John Walkenbach's advanced Excel programming books, I could create a graphical representation of the well bore's profile from downhole telemetry data, condensed so that the drillers and I could easily see which way the bit was going thanks to Excel's charting functions and some tricky Visual Basic wizardry.

It seemed there was nothing that Excel could not do.

UK student Rebecca Rickwood has won a global competition to find the best user of Microsoft's spreadsheet software, Excel 2007.

Rebecca, who is 15, was one of 228,000 competitors from 57 countries. She beat 78 students in the final round.

Competitors were required to perform timed tests to demonstrate their skill at making spreadsheets.

She scored 100%. Can't get much better than that.

I'd like to see that test.

I've never used Facebook, and I don't really like Twitter. But I'm having lots of fun with Google+. It's very confusing at first, but once you get the hang of it, you'll be impressed.

You can read my public G+ posts here. If you have an account, you can post comments. And if you like, you can add me to a circle so you won't miss any of the (usually) nonsense I post.

Right now, Google+ is in beta and new accounts are by invitation only. Here's an offer for you: If you're a PUP user and you'd like a Google+ invitation, send me an email and I'll pull some strings and get you on board.

I have a few prominent Excel bloggers in my circles, but I haven't seen much Excel content. That might change in the future. Mostly it's just fun time-wasting posts.

Corporate annual reports and the Wikipedia are two great resources to find really bad charts. We can’t do much about corporate reports, but we can actually change the Wikipedia articles. So, here is an assignment for you: find a bad chart and replace it with one that actually makes sense from a data visualization point of view.

Here's an example, from List of U.S. states and territories by population.

Specifically, it crashes Excel every time I click the Criteria tab. It used to work fine, but a few weeks ago it stopped working. This has me stumped. I'm wondering if it's something unique to my system. One other person has a reported a problem with the Criteria tab, but he didn't say that it crashes Excel.

In the interest of fairness to sleepy-heads, I was asked to do another two-hour sale. Figuring out the optimal 2-hour window is too much work, so I decided to make it a 24-hour sale, which begins:

• Tuesday, June 7, at 4:00 PM (UTC time)

The start time for some other areas:

Honolulu:Tuesday, June 7, 6:00 AM
US West Coast: Tuesday, June 7, 9:00 AM
US East Coast: Tuesday, June 7, 12:00 noon
London: Tuesday, June 7, 5:00 PM
Moscow: Tuesday, June 7, 8:00 PM
Perth: Tuesday, June 7, 12:00 midnight
Melbourne: Wednesday, June 8, 2:00 AM
New Zealand: Wednesday, June 8, 4:00 AM

The prices are the same as for the previous sale:

• PUP v7: $7.77 (normally $40.00)
• PUP v6: $6.66 (normally $39.95)
• The complete VBA source code is available for an additional $20.00

This will probably be the last PUP sale this year, so now is the time to get a great deal on a great Excel add-in. Even better, buy a license for everyone in your office.

• Click here to go to the order form

The London 2012 Olympics is set be a humanoid spectacle of the like never witnessed by the world's population before. Or something. But disturbing information has reached us at Vulture Central that reveals the organisation's entire cultural events database is stored in *gasp* Excel.

A job vacancy currently advertised on the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) website is offering a competitive salary to someone who can maintain and report on data held in Microsoft's spreadsheet software.

But surely the database contains hundreds if not thousands of entries - how can LOCOG possibly expect little old Excel to cope?

I think Excel can handle it. But I won't be applying for the job.

Here's the job description.

(via Smurf on Spreadsheets)

The problem is, half of the world was sleeping during those two hours.

So another sale is coming up real soon. Watch this space for the date and time.

Nothing wrong on my end.  I just wanted to comment that my office shelves look like the J-Walk Memorial Programming Library. I have learned from and enjoyed the books that you have written.  Keep it going.

Thanks for the Data Form v3.  Greatly appreciated!!!

I'd like to see a photo of the J-Walk Memorial Programming Library.

My life's motto is that I can take a pile of um....er.....dung and make something out of it.

Apparently, my employer is aware of this because they threw me into a job of compiling data from various spreadsheets.  I need to format this conglomeration into a nice looking and accurate report.

The only experience I had with formulas was the SUM and COUNTA functions. Pitiful!

I put on my job performance review that using formulas and macros was something I would like to learn in the future.  They took me at my word and threw me in the pool before I learned how to swim! I am surrounded by books and print outs from MS Help.  However, I find that I can find answers to most of my problems from your Excel 2003 Formulas book.

The Index is easy to use and it is written in a clear, concise manner, without using words that try to dazzle and impress me.  I don't want to be impressed, I just want to get my spreadsheets to work.

You have helped this old dinosaur keep myself current in my workplace.  I have been working here since 1982 and want to get 30 years in.

Thanks for all your help, Mr. Walkenbach!!

I'm glad you found my book helpful, Janet.

The world now has 303 additional licensed users of PUP. And 38% of them will be pouring through the VBA source code to see how it works. Orders came from 26 countries:

Of the licenses purchased, 87% were for PUP v7 -- which means that those users are using Excel 2007 or Excel 2010.

Should I schedule another 2-hour sale that occurs 12 hours later in the day than this one? That would accommodate people who were sound asleep during this sale.

Check out these prices:

• PUP v7: $7.77 (normally $40.00)
• PUP v6: $6.66 (normally $39.95)
• The complete VBA source code is available for an additional $20.00

The sale will be on Tuesday, May 3 between the hours of 11:00 am and 1:00 pm U.S. Eastern Time (that's 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm GMT).

Plus, you might win a free book. Three books will be given away. Everyone who orders PUP during this 2-hour period will be entered in a drawing to win a free Excel book. Winners choose their book (subject to availability). Each license ordered = one chance to win. Order 100 licenses, and you're practically guaranteed to win at least one book -- maybe all three.

On Tuesday, here's where you go to order: Special 2-Hour Sale Order Form.

Spread the word.

​The Google Public Data Explorer makes large datasets easy to explore, visualize and communicate. As the charts and maps animate over time, the changes in the world become easier to understand. You don't have to be a data expert to navigate between different views, make your own comparisons, and share your findings.

Students, journalists, policy makers and everyone else can play with the tool to create visualizations of public data, link to them, or embed them in their own webpages. Embedded charts and links can update automatically so you’re always sharing the latest available data.

You can also upload your own data, and use the tools to visualize it. It must be in DSPL (Dataset Publishing Language) format.

The PUP v7.1 version:

• Adds support for 64-bit Excel 2010. Note that this has nothing to do with 64-bit Windows. Most people who use Excel 2010 on 64-bit Windows 7 use the 32-bit version of Excel 2010. The upgrade is necessary only for those who use the 64-bit version of Excel 2010. In Excel 2010, choose File - Help to determine if you're running the 64-bit version of Excel.
• Displays the PUP dialog box in the center of Excel's window. This is relevant for those who use a dual monitor system.

If you're a registered user of any version of PUP, you can upgrade to PUP 7.1 by submitting the Upgrade Form.

If you've purchased the VBA password for PUP v7, be aware that PUP v7.1 uses the same password. Therefore, you won't need to purchase it again if you upgrade.