Excel 2007… testing on a PC near you
The snazzy new Office application from Redmond hit Public Beta this week and the downloads of the application numbered quite high. I of course was quick to get the software. I thought I might go through some of the things I have found so far (which isnt many but I will post more as they come to me).
The Excel 2007 application is sweet. It uses tabs with mouseover rather than traditional menus (shown below)
Excel also uses this mouse over styling to show you things like conditional formatting so you do not have to commit to the choice without viewing it, which is rather nice. The conditional formatting options are also improved, you can use in cell coloring to draw users to certain data or KPI style stoplights to present key items.
External data display is also improved. When using pivot tables to showcase external items you are allowed to drill into the results of the dataset. You can show or hide additional details.
Traditional tables allow for advanced sorting, even/odd row colors and are very easy to use/create
An example of a table with applied conditional formatting is shown below:
Another nice thing, since we have a table above that could grow as John Doe’s sales increase, is that Microsoft has gotten rid of the 65000 row limit on worksheets.
