Workbook Link support coming to Excel for the web

by Scott Muniz | Aug 18, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

When collecting data from multiple workbooks, it’s often desirable to link directly to the data. Why? It provides a record of where the data was sourced and, if the data changes, you can easily refresh it. This has made Workbook Link support a highly requested feature for our web users. Today, we are excited to announce that Workbook Link support is beginning to roll out to Excel for the web.

This was previously only available in Excel for Windows and Excel for Mac, and is an important step on our journey to meeting one of our key goals: “Customers can use our web app for all their work and should never feel they need to fall back to the rich client”. You can read more about our web investment strategy in Brian’s recent post.

Creating a new Workbook Link

To create a new Workbook Link, follow these simple steps:

• Open two workbooks in Excel for the web. They should be stored in either OneDrive or SharePoint.
• In the source workbook, copy the range.
• In the destination workbook, “paste links” via the right click menu or via paste special on the home tab.

The gif below provides a brief demonstration.

Creating Workbook Links

You can also explicitly reference the workbook using the following reference pattern. =’https://domain/folder/[workbookName.xlsx]sheetName’!CellOrRangeAddress

Opening a workbook that contains Workbook Links

When you open a workbook that contains Workbook Links, you will see a yellow bar notifying you that the workbook is referencing external data.

Data Connection Warning

If you ignore or dismiss the bar, we will not update the links and instead keep the values from before. If you click the “Enable Content” button, Excel for the web will retrieve the values from all the linked workbooks.

Managing Workbook Links

To help you manage Workbook Links, we’ve added a new Workbook Links task pane. The task pane can be accessed by pressing the Workbook Links button on the Data tab or via the “Manage Workbook Links” button on the yellow bar above.

Workbook Links button on the Data tab

You can see the task pane below with its menus expanded below.

Workbook Links Taskpane

The task pane lists all your linked workbooks and provides you with information on the status of each of the linked workbooks. If the link could not be updated, the status will explain the cause. So that you can quickly spot issues, any workbook that cannot be updated will be bubbled to the top of the list. 

At a global level you can take the following actions:

Refresh all: This triggers an immediate refresh of all linked workbooks.

Refresh links automatically: When enabled, this causes Excel to periodically check for updated values while you are in the workbook.

Break all links: This removes all the Workbook Links by replacing those formulas with their current values.

At a workbook level you can take the following actions:

Refresh workbook: This triggers an immediate refresh of that linked workbook.

Open workbook: This opens the linked workbook in another tab.

Break links: This removes links to that workbook by replacing those formulas with their values.

Find next link: This selects the next occurrence of a link to that linked workbook. (Great for quickly finding phantom links)

Workbook Links vs External Links

Direct links to external workbooks have historically been referred to simply as “External Links”. As we continue to add more external data sources to Excel, the term “External Links” has become ambiguous. To improve clarity going forward, we will use the term “Workbook Links” instead.

Learn More

You can find additional information about Workbook Links on our help page.

Changes to KB articles used for Cumulative Updates

by Scott Muniz | Aug 18, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Back in March 2020, the main Knowledge Base (KB) articles for Cumulative Updates (CUs) started including inline description for fixes. We call those descriptions “blurbs” and they replace many of the individual KB articles that existed for each product fix but contained only brief descriptions. In other words, the same short one or two sentence description that existed in a separate KB article before, now appears directly in the main CU KB article. For fixes that require longer explanation, provide additional information, workarounds, and troubleshooting steps, a full KB article is still created as usual.

Detail

SQL Server used the Incremental Servicing Model for a long time to deliver updates to the product. This model used consistent and predictable delivery of Cumulative Updates (CUs) and Service Packs (SPs). A couple of years ago, we announced the Modern Servicing Model to accelerate the frequency and quality of delivering the updates. This model relies heavily on CUs as the primary mechanism to release product fixes and updates, but also provides the ability to introduce new capabilities and features in CUs.

Historically, every CU comes with a KB article, and you can take a look at some of these articles in the update table available in our latest updates section of the docs. Each one of these CU main KB articles has a well-defined and consistent format: metadata information about the update, mechanisms to acquire and install the update, and a list of all the fixes (with bug IDs) and changes in the update. In some rare occasions when an issue is found after the CU is released, there might be a section that provides a heads-up to users about a known problem encountered after applying the update, and its scope.

Now imagine a CU with a payload of 50 fixes. If you want to know more about each fix, you’d have to click through 50 child KB articles (one per fix) and we received strong feedback that wasn’t a friendly experience. We all agree that frequent context switching is not efficient – be it computer processing code or human brain reading things. So how do you optimize this experience and still maintain the details provided in the shorter individual articles you used to click and read?

With the concept of “article inlining”! Yes, we borrowed the same concept we use in the SQL Database Engine (e.g. scalar UDF inlining) and computer programming in general (e.g. inline functions).

Why this change?

We will take this opportunity to explain the thought process that went into this change and what data points and decision points we use to drive this change. Besides user feedback, and because we are data-driven after all, we also looked at page views and hit rate from search engines for these individual articles compared to the main CU KB article. We found that usually the page views for the main CU KB articles is measured in the thousands, while the individual fix KB articles are read very few times.

Using blurbs

The normal format used for the individual fix KB article include: Title, Symptoms, Status, Resolution, and References. However, not all fixes are implemented the same way. For example, let us look at SQL Server 2019 CU1 article. The first fix in the table is FIX: Transaction log isn’t truncated on a single node Availability Group in SQL Server, and when you install it, the fix is simply applied and enabled.

Let us click on the link and open this article to understand more details about this fix. Here is what we see:

The only useful information you get from this lengthy article is the Symptoms section. Usually the title of the article provides a summary of the symptoms section. Now look at other sections:

• Status: of course we know this is a problem in the software – otherwise why is a fix needed?
• Resolution: this seems obvious enough – that you need to apply this cumulative update to fix this problem.

By moving the two lines from the Symptoms section in this individual fix KB article to the main CU KB article, then you can avoid extra clicks and context switches.

You can go down the list of fix articles in that KB and find many articles that fit this pattern. Our Content Management team did a study of several past CUs and found that the majority of individual fix KB articles (to the tune of 85%) follow this pattern and can be good candidates to “inlining” the symptom description in the main CU KB article table.

Criteria for creating a full KB Article

However, you can identify KB articles in that list with different patterns of information:

• For FIX: Orphaned CLR sessions cause blocking in SQL Server, you need to perform additional actions to activate the fix using a trace flag.
• For FIX: Data masking of user-defined functions may result in crashes in SQL Server 2019, even before applying the CU, you can choose to use the available workaround.
• And for FIX: Upgrading FCI passive node from SQL Server 2019 RC1 to RTM fails when you try to access the MSSQLJOBS which is on the shared drive, you may need to take special steps to apply this cumulative update.

In such scenarios, we carefully evaluate if we can perform inlining and still manage to represent this additional information in the main CU KB article. If not, then these are good candidates to have an individual KB article. For example, FIX: SQL Writer Service fails to back up in non-component backup path in SQL Server 2016, 2017 and 2019 is very detailed, and includes error log snippets and other details that can’t be inlined.  

To each their own

In SQL Server 2017 and 2019, product improvements or new capabilities (such as DMV, catalog views, or T-SQL changes) are shipped through CUs, as there are no more SPs. You will find plenty of examples about this in the CU article list we are using as reference. Being improvements or new capabilities, information belongs in the product documentation, not in support KB articles. Otherwise this will cause a disconnect when you look at product documentation. Going forward, this is the pattern you’ll see.

We have used this style of fix lists in the past with service packs. An example is SQL Server 2014 Service Pack 1 release information. Also, many modern products use release notes to convey all pertinent information about that specific update. For example: Release notes for Azure Data Studio and Update Rollup 1 for System Center Service Manager 2019

Going forward

As we mentioned, we started piloting this approach around the March 2020 timeframe. The initial releases we attempted this style for were SQL Server 2016 SP2 CU12 and SQL Server 2019 CU3. Our friends and colleagues called it the “Attack of the blurbs!”. Some folks called it the TL/DR version of KB articles. And while the reactions have been predominantly positive and encouraging, we will constantly fine tune these approaches based on user feedback. As part of this change, we are also improving the content reviews done for the CU articles to ensure they contain relevant and actionable information for users.

One important callout we would like to make sure users understand is about the quality of these fixes. When we stated in the Incremental Servicing Model (ISM) post that “(…) we now recommend ongoing, proactive installation of CU’s as they become available. You should plan to install a CU with the same level of confidence you plan to install SP’s (Service Packs) as they are released. This is because CU’s are certified and tested to the level of SP’s (…)”, we meant it, and are continuously making the process more robust. Irrespective of whether a fix has an individual KB article or an inline reference in the main CU KB  article, they go through the same rigorous quality checks. In fact, KB article writing and creating documentation is the last step in the CU release cycle: only after a fix passes the quality gates and is included in the CUs, does the documentation step happen.

Empowering Students and Beginners in Machine Learning with DirectML

by Scott Muniz | Aug 18, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Over the past few years, there has been increasing demand for introductory coursework in artificial intelligence and machine learning. Enrollment in Introduction to Machine Learning classes at universities in the US have grown as much as 12 times in the past decade[1]. These introductory courses play a key role in educating the future of machine learning professionals.

The rest of this post is meant as a follow-up to our press release highlighting our release of DirectML on WSL, NVIDIA CUDA support, and TensorFlow with DirectML package. Learn more

DirectML for Students and Beginners

The DirectML teams wants to ensure that the Windows devices students and beginners  use can fully support their coursework.  Our solution starts by providing hardware accelerated training on the breadth of Windows hardware, across DirectX 12 based GPU, via DirectML. The DirectML API enables GPU accelerated training and inferencing for machine learning models.

TensorFlow + DirectML

In June 2020, we took our first step to enable future professionals to leverage their current hardware across the breadth of the Windows ecosystem by releasing a preview package of TensorFlow with a DirectML backend.

Through this package, we are meeting students and beginners where they are by providing support for the models they want in a frameworks they use, all while making the most of their existing GPU hardware.

Students and beginners can start with the TensorFlow tutorial models or our examples to start building the foundation for their future.

Engage with our Community

If you try out the TensorFlow with DirectML package and run into issues, we would love to hear your feedback on our DirectML GitHub repo.

We are looking to engage with the community of educators to better understand key scenarios for students and beginners getting into machine learning.  Share your thoughts in this survey to shape investments we make with DirectML to provide GPU hardware acceleration to additional ML tools and frameworks.

[1] https://hai.stanford.edu/sites/default/files/ai_index_2019_report.pdf