Today David Gainer, Group Program Manager for Microsoft Excel has started an official Excel blog. Until the public release of Excel 12 (medio 2006 probably) he will publish about new stuff in Excel 12.

Well the first news he posts is great, more rows and columns! (like Quattro Pro has for years).

From his site:
Probably the most common question the Excel team gets from our customers is 'when are you going to add more rows and more columns'. There are many different scenarios behind these requests. Some customers want to be able to analyze more data than Excel has rows, some customers want to track more daily information than Excel has columns, and other customers want to perform matrix math on large matrices of thousands of elements. There are plenty of other scenarios too. Well, the answer to the question is 'in Excel 12' Specifically, the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That's 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV.

This is an exciting feature for us, because it is a feature that helps a very broad range of our customers, and we are looking forward to seeing what folks create with a bigger grid.

http://blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2005/09/23/473185.aspx

After mostly graphical changes (UI) we heard the last weeks which should make the already existing functionality easier te find, todays news shoud take some skepticism away.