What’s new for Excel 2013 – Personal observations

The customer preview of Office 2013 is finally available, and there is a lot of new things to look at, be it for users or for developers.

Here are a few personal observations based on my first look at the product.

• PowerPivot for Office 2013  now comes bundled with Excel, making Office On Demand, the evolution of the Click-To-Run technology, much more viable.
• The PowerPoint add-in is no longer required to build simple data models and pivot tables based on several data tables. Measures, KPIs and some other features will require the add-in to be activated.
• The message “To use multiple table in your analysis, a new PivotTable needs to be created based on the Data Model.” hints at the fact that old-school pivot tables are not dead yet and still are the default PivotTable type.
• New table objects in your workbook will automatically be added to your data model.
• You can create a pivot table based on a simple range and then transform the pivot table into a “PowerPivot model”. The initial range will not be transformed into a table object. Further ranges can be added through the Connections manager. (What for?)
• The data model can now be accessed from VBA. The corresponding object is called Model (not DataModel), despite what the MSDN documentation mentions about it.
• The PowerPivot add-in will not recognize tables that were added directly to the data model from Excel as linked tables. However, a new connection will be created in Excel, so that refactoring can be done from the Connections manager. A corresponding object called WorksheetDataConnection is available in VBA.
• You can create two worksheet data connections for the same range. Duplicating ranges for scenarios where the same data must be used twice (for example, when a dimension must play different roles) is no longer required.
• The function FILTERXML allows you to query an XML document with XPath. The WEBSERVICE function returns an XML text from a web service. ENCODEURL is a helper function to encode a string into a valid URL. All three functions are available in VBA through the WorksheetFunction object.
• The function FILTERXML returns an array. You can use it in array formulas, or in conjunction with the INDEX function, for example.
• New functions like SHEET, and SHEETS are available, although it is still unclear to me in which scenarios they will be useful, since there are still no specific functions a sheet index can re-used.
• ISFORMULA and FORMULATEXT are also new in Excel 2013.
• Examples in the help system are provided as embedded Excel Web App workbooks. This may solve some translation issues that have occurred in the past for non-English Office versions.
• Internet Explorer is used to navigate the VBA help. You can now alt-tab between the VBA environment and the documentation.