Unless someone managed to fill a depressed MS employed Excel programmer with
tequila (... hmm, how hard could that be ?
, this would be just
unqualified guessing. Absolutely nothing is stated anyhwere.
One can of couse hope for the continuing lack of animated gifs and blinking
cell formats.
Let's rather reverse the question: Which imaginary new features would make
you folks pay -real money- for an upgrade ?
...
Let me summarize your categories as what we can expect from MSFT and what we
want. Goody!
What we can expect
------------------
1. Not only animated GIFs and blinking cells, but also screaming cells as sound
files are added to cell formats.
2. Changes in the object model such as the VolumeControl event which can be used
to enforce max settings.
3. In response to all those people who want to be able to build expiration dates
into their workbooks, a new workbook property that will FORCE running
Workbook_Open events, thus allowing Excel to catch up to IE in terms of security
vulnerabilities.
4. Typesize settings for worksheet tabs so users running under 1600x1200 can
resize their tabs to make them legible so that other users running at 800x600
opening those workbooks can have most of their document windows filled with the
worksheet tabs.
5. You don't want to imagine how they're going to 'improve' AutoCorrect.
6. Yet another new help system, this time with pop-ups and direct links to MSN.
7. An Esperanto work-alike for BAHTTEXT.
8. You don't want to imagine how they're going to 'improve' the Task Pain.
What we shouldn't get our hopes up about
----------------------------------------
1. Larger worksheets.
2. New worksheet functions.
3. New *useful* options, such as a toggle for whether or not to pass CSV files
through the Text Import wizard.
4. Sensible things like allowing SUMIF and COUNTIF to accept 3D references and
multiple area ranges, defaulting the IRR seed interest rate to -0.5 or -0.9,
which both work a lot better than the current default, adding more 3D
functionality such as treating 3D references as if they were multiple area
ranges in INDEX calls, for that matter allowing INDEX to return an array result
when 2nd and 3rd arguments are positive scalars but the 4th argument is an
array, and allowing MODE to accept multiple area ranges and 3D references, which
both AVERAGE and MEDIAN can handle (since LARGE and SMALL both accept 3D
references, any claims that MODE would need too much storage to do this should
be taken with a boulder-size grain of salt).
5. Fixing the errors in the help files.
6. Word-like extended patterns for use in Edit > Replace (but not to worry, it's
likely you will be able to seach for animated GIFs and sound files as part of
the formatting).
7. Documentation on what exactly is returned by OFFSET(A1,{0;1;2},{3,4}) or
INDIRECT when passed an array as 1st argument.
8. A #BLANK! pseudo-error value that would be treated like a (gasp! what a
concept!) blank cell in both chart ranges and formulas.
