bottom up and top down approach
07 Sep 2008
Dec
27
Microsoft Excel 2007. The best new features: Part 1 - Usability
by David Harper, CFA, FRM, CIPM
Our customers include aspiring finance and accounting professionals. If you are in that group, then you probably work with Excel. I’ve been running Office 2007 since the beta release. This post explains my favorite new features in Excel 2007; Please look for the corresponding set of brief screencasts (movie tutorials) that review each of these features, for visual learners.
The new version offers many minor enhancements and a few major changes. The changes add up to a genuinely useful application. The bottom line on the new Excel is that it’s more fun and easier to get stuff done. And more advanced functions like external data connections and pivot tables are more accessible to “the rest of us.” (in fact, the importance of Excel 2007 might be that it finally makes the pivot table interface usable).
I grouped my favorite nine new features loosely into three categories: usability, styling, and data.
Usability #1 (the ribbon)
The new ribbon is not exclusive to Excel but belongs to all of the Office 2007 applications. I was disoriented at first, but eventually the ribbon makes perfect sense and it is clearly a usability improvement over the menu/toolbar construct. In old Excel, if I could not remember the location of a sought command (and who could?), I’d invariably waste time fishing through the menubar. Under the new ribbon, my first guess is often correct because the commands are grouped naturally according to broad duty. Also, for certain formatting commands, the new interface gives you a live preview of styles as you mouseover thumbnail galleries. You can now professionally format ranges with tremendous ease.
Usability #2: The big grid and fewer memory limits
The big grid contains over 17 billion cells. Of course most of us don’t need to go all the way over the column XFD or down to row1,048,576! More relevant is that Excel raises the bar on several memory limits. Usable PC memory doubles from 1 GB to 2 GB. The number of unique colors that can be applied in a single worksheet leaps from 56 to 16 million. The number of sorting (data > sort) levels jumps from three to 64 (see the dialog box image below – you can Add Levels without limit). And there are several other examples. If you are working with professional-level worksheets, the difference is that you just don’t bump up against constraints very often.
Usability #3: Better file operations
Excel 2007 now saves in either .XLSX (without macros) or .XLSM (with macros). These are ZIP containers that hold multiple XML files. I’ll write that again because it’s confusing: an excel workbook is saved as multiple XML files within a single, compressed ZIP container.
In the screencapture above, three of the Save As options include Excel Workbook (saves to .XLSX), Excel Macro-Enabled Workbook (saves to .XLSM) , and PDF. You can easily open the workbook with WinZip and see the underlying files. Here is a partial listing of the workbook I am using for the screencast tutorials:
I saved a file called newInExcel2007.XLSX. But it’s really a ZIP file that contains files like data1.xml (as above). In the long-run, this will be very convenient because eXtensible Markup Language (XML) is the structured format that can be shared across applications and platforms.
Finally, we have the option to save directly to PDF. This function belongs to Office generally not just Excel. But, at the time of this writing, it requires that you to download the free add-in: Microsoft Office Add-in: Save as PDF.
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