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A new build of “Data Explorer”, and an Auto Update feature

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Hi everyone!

We hope you have been enjoying Microsoft “Data Explorer” Preview for Excel.  We certainly have been having a fun time looking at the overall response and going through all the feedback you have been sending along. We would like to thank you for taking the time to send us feedback.

We would like to let you know that we just published an update that includes quite a few bug fixes and a handful of additional features that we think you will enjoy.

Now that it has been a few weeks since we initially released the preview, it is a good time to talk about how we plan on delivering updates to you while we are in this preview phase.

In the Data Explorer ribbon, you may have noticed an “Update” button.

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Usually, this button is grayed out. When we do publish updates, you will notice that this button turns on and you can click on it to get details about the update. This is just a small convenience feature to help you get to the right update without much trouble.

To update your Data Explorer preview bits, you can just wait for this to light up. Of course, you can always go to the Data Explorer page on Microsoft Download Center to find the latest bits if you are still waiting for the update button to light up.

This update includes additional data sources – namely:

  • Windows Azure HDInsight
  • Teradata
  • PostgreSQL

We also have improved the query editing functionality. If you go into the Settings dialog, you will find an option to “Enable Advanced Query Editing”

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Once you do this, you will be able to edit an entire query by clicking on the new icon that appears in the formula bar.

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Here’s what the query editing experience looks like:

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Enabling “Advanced Query Editing” also allows you to write a query from scratch instead of using one of the pre-defined data sources.

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There are a lot of bug fixes as well as I already mentioned. Give this build of Data Explorer a spin and let us know how you like it. Reach us via the Data Explorer forum.

 

Faisal Mohamood

Program Manager | Data Explorer

Comments

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2013
    Thanks for the update. I have a question regarding the Online Search feature. I was wondering if it is possible to integrate it with a corporate search engine to expose internal information/data.