Thread: Microsoft Excel 2010

Excel hasn't been worked upon as much as the other applications in Office 2010, but nevertheless it gets the same general improvements in the interface; the look is simpler and cleaner, you can add Recent files to the backstage menu like in Word and the print preview has been thoroughly improved and now lets you see the margins and zoom in-zoom out feature has been added to see the whole page or zoom in to read individual cells.

The conditional formatting feature has also been overhauled, and new styles and icons have been added. One new feature in Excel is PowerPivot which lets you quickly scroll through millions of rows of data in seconds for large data sheets. Complicated charts render far faster than Excel 2007 (which introduced a powerful but slow new charting engine) although still not as fast as they used to do in 2003 (lesser functionality then, of course). Spread sheets now load and save more quickly (especially if you're using the binary XLS format). Statistical functions in Excel have previously been notoriously inaccurate. But Excel 2010 has newly accurate statistical functions signed off for accuracy by professional number-crunchers.



If you use pivot tables, a new feature called "slices" makes it easier to explore the information; unlike having to turn columns and categories on and off in the task pane like in previous versions. With "Sparklines" that can be embedded in any worksheet, you can add instant visualisations to your data that give you a picture of what the numbers mean without creating a chart for every cell. You might take some time learning to exploit them, but these give you the kind of visualisations we're getting used to seeing in Web 2.0 apps inside your spread sheet.

It seems that 2010 is the same with 2007, if you found anything new, please post here.