Drilling around in your Excel PivotTables and PivotCharts

AppId is over the quota
AppId is over the quota

This week, I want to turn your attention to one of the truly fantastic Business Intelligence (BI) features that we added to the new Excel. It's called, Quick Explore, and, as long as you are working in the volume licensed desktop version or in the Office 365 "E3" and "E4," or "M" packages, you may have seen its entry point when hovering over any of the dimensions or measures in a PivotTable or PivotChart. It represents one of the many BI elements that we focused on in Excel in order to elevate Excel to one of the preeminent analytic tools in the market today. Once you have a PivotTable or PivotChart on your spreadsheet, you can easily access the Quick Explore option by either hovering over a series member, or a category, and clicking on the magnifying glass or bringing up the context menu and selecting the option from there.

Or you can get to it from the PivotTable by clicking on any row member, column member, or value cell (you cannot get to it via subtotal or grand total value cells):

 

And, yes, you read that correctly. You can drill on a value cell. In the case of the value cell, we simply grab the associated member context and drill on that. This allows users to drill on a dimension value without having to find the corresponding row.

When you click on the icon, you are presented with the option to cross-drill, or explore, or "pivot," against any of the other measures or dimensions for the series on which you clicked. For example, when I "Quick Explore" on the West region, I am presented with the ability to drill on the data associated with that member of the Region measure.

Clicking on the year member automatically adds it to my filter list and pivots my data accordingly.

And now that we've added the field list to the Office Web App experience, you can interact with the Quick Explore feature in nearly the same way as you would in the desktop version. If, for example, you don't want to drill within the context of Region (as in this case), you can simply drag it to another part of the field well and continue your analysis in other meaningful ways. But unlike with the client experience, in the browser you can disable interactivity (either in embedding or in the SharePoint web part properties). Disabling interactivity will prevent users from filtering, sorting, and  . . . exploring.

So there you have it -- Quick Explore is a stellar feature and really makes Excel a terrific ad-hoc analytic tool in your BI toolset.

Kevin Donovan

Program Manager, Office BI

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Helping people around the world with our technology

Our friends over at Microsoft Citizenship have numerous programs running worldwide designed to help create social and economic opportunities for people and businesses (such as nonprofit organizations) through the use of Microsoft technologies. To help tell stories of success and impact from these programs, they have created the Local Impact Map (LIM). LIM is an interactive map of the world that lets you pick choose different regions to see stories.

This week the LIM has been updated with several updates and improvements. When the LIM was first launched 2 years ago, it featured only 200 stories. But with 1,400 stories as of today, they had to make changes to the LIM that improves the organization of all those stories. The new LIM uses Bing Maps where little dots are used representing regions where you can discover stories. For example with the United States, dots represent the states. For other countries, dots represent regions within those countries. They even got things down to a specific region like Silicon Valley where a lot of activities take place through our programs.

So why am I blogging about this here? Well, as I mentioned above – these programs from Microsoft Citizenship use our technologies to help people around the world. That of course includes Windows! I thought I would share a few stories with you that serve as good examples of just how we’re helping people:

Helping Teleton Serve the Children of Mexico

Teleton is the largest private children’s rehabilitation system in the world serving over 113,000 children with disabilities in Mexico. When Teleton hosted their annual 24 hour telethon to raise funds for their network, Microsoft made a contribution of US 8.9 million U.S. dollars to the organization and Windows outfitted a number of the centers with Windows 7!

Boys & Girls Clubs Offer Camps on Technology and Leadership

In North Carolina, the Boys and Girls Club of America worked with Microsoft to host Technology Camps to help boost the skills of 11th graders who were looking to study in the IT field. Microsoft donated 100 copies of Windows 7 and Microsoft Office which were installed on laptops given to students.

Upgrading Family Support Centers

Nestwarme is an organization that provides technology support for families with disabled and chronically ill children. In order to streamline its employee and volunteer communication without raising overhead costs, the organization needed an upgrade in technology – and Microsoft helped!

These are just a few of many stories featured on the Local Impact Map highlighting how Microsoft made an impact with our programs to help people and businesses out. I am extremely proud of our company’s ongoing commitment to helping people around the world! For more information on the new Local Impact Map, I suggest reading this blog post from Jean-Philippe Courtois, President of Microsoft International.

One more thing…

The new LIM includes a new “Snapshot” feature. By clicking the little camera icon at the top right of the site, you can take a snapshot of your favorite stories. A URL is then created that you can share out to anyone you want who can then see your collection of snapshots of your favorite stories from the LIM. Click here to see the collection of stories I mention above from the LIM.

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Set text wrap around images and shapes in PowerPoint? Avoid it!

We see a lot of questions about flow as you text in PowerPoint around a picture or shape. And it is not easy (although we article have PowerPoint 2010 and PowerPoint 2007 , which explain, admittedly complicated workarounds to get the wrapping effect).

As difficult and awkward to do it, we would like to see more comments from people who are unhappy as people who say, they find it useful.

But PowerPoint works best if it has less text. Some keywords. Not enough to wrap. This is a problem, the we here on the PowerPoint blog passionate than feel.

If you want to communicate many words, Word is a better bet. Publisher is. You can can create files, read the people at will.

You want to create a presentation, especially when you present the person, less words work so much harder for you especially if you add a picture to.

You need not put everything on a slide, because people who read film be and is not for you to hear. (If you want all available information, when you book the deck or then send it in e-Mail, add it to you. the notes section)

Less on a film set and employs to keep changing films, which often helps the audience. With one or two keywords and a compelling image, the audience gets magic-they find out how these elements want to relate. They hear you. In a presentation, which is a good thing.

I know that nobody likes as you are told with their software. But after a few simple policy-as the entertaining illustrated by Doug Thomas in his Office casual to create better presentationsor Microsoft MVP Stephanie Krieger 12 Tips for creating better presentations - skills to create compelling presentations without ever wrap text in PowerPoint again.

--Erik Jensen

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