How To Work with Team System using Excel - Introduction

One of the most powerful tools in the Team System is the Excel, when I say Excel I mean the good old Excel tool that we have in our Office tools.

Team System is integrated with Excel which gives the user the ability to use all the grate features of the Excel and still work directly with the TFS (Team Foundation Server), for example lets say I need to change the state field of 100 work items from Proposed to Active, with the Team Explorer I will need to go one by one and change its state but with the Excel all I will do is change one and drag the cell to all the rest, publish my changes and that is it.

When I look at my customers using the Team System I see users that don't really understand the full potential that is hidden in this grate tool so for them and for all the rest of our readers I decided to dedicate this blog post and 6 of my future blog posts to write a guide that will (hopefully) cover the main features.

These days I am participating in a unique project at one of our customers sites, the project is a beta implementation of the Team System code name "Rosario".
Unfortunately I can't talk about any of the things we are doing there but I like to dedicate the last 2 posts of this guide to the Rosario new features added to Excel.
All features that I will show in these 2 posts are already available in the CTP12 that was already released so you can start evaluating them.

These are the blog posts subjects:

1. Introduction - This is the current blog post that opens the guide. 
2. Export to Excel - I will show different ways to export work items from the Team explorer to Excel, I will add one more option later when I present the Rosario.
3. Choose Columns - I will explain how to set the columns in the document to get the maximum efficiency and conformability and I will present the most important and helpful columns.
4. Publish and Refresh - I will explain how to Publish and to deal with publish problems, I will also explain how to refresh the data and how to control what we are refreshing.
5. Get Work items and Change List Configuration options - I will show how we can change the list of work items so you will have better control over your items.
6. Rosario: Parent Child relation - I will show how to add children to items and how it is shown in the Excel, I will also add one more option for the export from the Team Explorer.
7. Rosario: Generate Reports - I will show how to create reports with a click of a button and how to configure them in the Rosario.

See you on the next post...