Below are interesting items from around the web:

It's that time to update the annual and five-year financial forecasting model that I use at work. The model relies heavily on linear regression techniques to perform the forecasts. For reference, Kelly O'Day has an excellent writeup on his Process Trends site titled Trend Analysis with Excel.

In A Belated Review of Excel 2007, Jon Peltier describes his experiences with the latest release. Although I have Excel 2003 and 2007, I tend to do almost all of my work in 2003 more than likely because that's also what we use at work. However, that will probably change soon as the healthcare system that I work for recently purchased licenses for Office 2007 to support the local staff.

In September of 2005, David Gainer wrote in the The Excel Team Blog that Excel 2007 "made huge improvements to our charting engine for great-looking charts in Excel and across Office" and that Microsoft had "reworked the chart UI to make creating and working with charts much simpler and easier". Fast-forward to 2008 . . . I wonder what the general opinion of end-users and developers is now regarding functionality and features?

Microsoft's Office Fluent User Interface Developer Portal contains a series of resources for customizing the Office 2007 ribbon.

This site uses a combination of CSS and HTML tables. One of my favorite references for formatting tables in CSS is Robert Denton's CSS Tables Tutorial. Although the last update to this site was in 2002, adapting the CSS examples to XHTML standards was very easy with the help of the WC3 Validator. TechRepublic also has a nice writeup titled Why CSS Styling is for Tables Too.

Mandarin Design is one of my favorite resources for general website and blog design. The site features a variety of formatting techniques for setting up multiple columns, floating images, etc. Unfortunately the author passed away sometime back so the site is no longer actively updated. However, it is still online which is great for novice users like myself.

John - I’m working on a couple follow-ups to my belated review, which will cover general charting in Excel 2007, and the new dialogs for Excel 2007 charting. Whatever the official Microsoft blog says about Excel 2007 charting, there were hardly any improvements. My post on the subject should be out in a couple days.