Like many others, I have been playing with the Microsoft Office 2007 Beta. Well, Excel 2007.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to cover charting (this time), that has been covered quite well by the fine folks at Juice Analytics.

Nope, one of the features that I was (am) most excited about are some of the new conditional formatting features, especially what Microsoft is calling ‘Icon Sets’ which basically allow you to have conditional arrows or stoplights, etc based on the cell value, and displayed in the cell.

So, like I said, I’ve been playing and am stumped by a few things.

1. Why are the icon sizes based on row height? You might have a cell with 8 pt. font but the row height is 32 and guess what? The conditional icon is sized to the row - not the font! It looks totally goofy and in fact can interfere with reading the data in the cell. I’m no expert but shouldn’t those icons be sized relative to the font and not the row?

2. Why can’t the icons be aligned? They are always on the left (when accompanied by text)! I ought to be able to set their alignment and I ought to be able to do it independently of the text alignment.

3. Conditional Color Gradients - why aren’t these to scale? I haven’t whipped out Photoshop to make the actual measurements but it is quite obvious that the color gradients are not to scale. Precision is important even if you are just giving a quick-and-dirty sense of relative size. Would it really have been that hard to make the gradients precise? If precision affected the presentability of the gradients, then maybe they shouldn’t have been included.

Still, these new conditional formats and icons are leaps and bounds ahead of the current offering so I’m still looking forward to them.

Have you been testing the Excel beta? What are your pet peeves so far?