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Microsoft Excel Help
Microsoft Excel Help
Microsoft Excel Help
Microsoft Excel has been available for more than a quarter century and for nearly all that time has been the world's most popular spreadsheet software. Excel's programmability, connectivity, and rich feature set have allowed it to become a popular development platform and Excel is now used to power custom and commercial applications of every imaginable type and in all industries.
In addition to being deployed as an out-of-the-box spreadsheet, Excel is widely used as a front-end to sophisticated data analysis and decision support programs built with Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and connected to powerful databases such as SQL Server. VBA is also a popular tool for creating custom macros that add to Excel's already extensive library of functions. In addition, Excel is often deployed as a number-crunching back-end to custom applications that can be quickly built with popular products such as Microsoft Access, or as an easily-maintained database for generating individualized form letters or emails with Microsoft Word. Excel's versatility is enhanced further by its ability to connect to real-time data sources through interfaces like DDE and RTD, allowing Excel to be used for monitoring events such as changes in equity prices.
Decision Consultants' Microsoft-certified application experts offer a broad range of online services to help you design, program, deploy, manage, and troubleshoot applications based on any version of Excel. Decision Consultants can also help you migrate to newer Excel releases, including the latest 64-bit version, and offers cost-effective online webinar training classes in Excel that can be customized for individuals or groups.
Microsoft Office Excel 2007 is a powerful tool you can use to create and format spreadsheets, and analyze and share information to make more informed decisions. With the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, rich data visualization, and PivotTable views, professional-looking charts are easier to create and use.
Office Excel 2007, combined with Excel Services, a new technology included with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, provides significant improvements for sharing data with greater security. You can share sensitive business information more broadly with enhanced security with your coworkers, customers, and business partners. By sharing a spreadsheet using Office Excel 2007 and Excel Services, you can navigate, sort, filter, input parameters, and interact with PivotTable views directly on the Web browser. New features of the latest 2007 edition of Microsoft Excel include:
Results-oriented User Interface. The new results-oriented user interface makes it easy for you to work in Microsoft Office Excel. Commands and features that were often buried in complex menus and toolbars are now easier to find on task-oriented tabs that contain logical groups of commands and features. Many dialog boxes are replaced with drop-down galleries that display the available options, and descriptive tooltips or sample previews are provided to help you choose the right option.
More Rows and Columns, and Other New Limits. To enable you to explore massive amounts of data in worksheets, Office Excel 2007 supports up to 1 million rows and 16 thousand columns per worksheet. This represents 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than Excel 2003. Instead of 4 thousand types of formatting, you can now use an unlimited number in the same workbook, and the number of cell references per cell are increased from 8 thousand to limited by available memory. For improved performance, memory management has been increased from 1 GB of memory in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 to 2 GB in Office Excel 2007. You will also experience faster calculations in large, formula-intensive worksheets because Office Excel 2007 supports multiple processors and multithreaded chipsets.
Rich Conditional Formatting. In 2007 Office release, you can use conditional formatting to visually annotate your data for both analytical and presentation purposes. To easily find exceptions and to spot important trends in your data, you can implement and manage multiple conditional formatting rules that apply rich visual formatting in the form of gradient colors, data bars, and icon sets to data that meets those rules. Conditional formats are also easy to apply—in just a few clicks, you can see relationships in your data that you can use for your analysis purposes.
Easy Formula Writing. Improvements in formula writing include a resizable formula bar with more levels of nesting, function autocomplete for completing formula arguments, the ability to manage multiple named ranges in a central location, and structured references. In addition to cell references, Office Excel 2007 provides structured references that reference named ranges and tables in a formula.
New OLAP Formulas and Cube Functions. When you work with multidimensional databases (such as SQL Server Analysis Services) in Office Excel 2007, you can use OLAP formulas to build complex, free form, OLAP data bound reports. New cube functions are used to extract OLAP data (sets and values) from Analysis Services and display it in a cell. OLAP formulas can be generated when you convert PivotTable formulas to cell formulas or when you use AutoComplete for cube function arguments when you type formulas.
Improved Sorting and Filtering. In Office Excel 2007, you can quickly arrange your worksheet data to find the answers that you need by using enhanced filtering and sorting. For example, you can now sort data by color and by more than 3 (and up to 64) levels. You can also filter data by color or by dates, display more than 1000 items in the AutoFilter drop-down list, select multiple items to filter, and filter data in PivotTables.
Excel Table Enhancement. In Office Excel 2007,the new user interface makes it easy to create, format, and expand an Excel table (known as an Excel list in Excel 2003) to organize the data on your worksheet. New or improved functionality for tables includes table header rows, calculated columns, automatic AutoFiltering, structured references, total rows, and table styles.
Shared Charting. In 2007 Office release, charting is shared between Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Rather than using the charting features that are provided by Microsoft Graph, Word and PowerPoint now incorporate the powerful charting features of Excel. Because an Excel worksheet is used as the chart data sheet for Word and PowerPoint charts, shared charting provides the rich functionality of Excel, including the use of formulas, filtering, sorting, and the ability to link a chart to external data sources, such as Microsoft SQL Server and Analysis Services (OLAP), for up-to-date information in your chart. The Excel worksheet that contains the data of your chart can be stored in your Word document or PowerPoint presentation, or in a separate file to reduce the size of your documents.
Easy-to-use PivotTables. In Office Excel 2007, PivotTables are much easier to use than in earlier versions of Excel. By using the new PivotTable user interface, the information that you want to view about your data is just a few clicks away—you no longer have to drag data to drop zones that aren't always an easy target. Instead, you can simply select the fields that you want to see in a new PivotTable field list.
Quick Connections to External Data. In Office Excel 2007, you no longer need to know the server or database names of corporate data sources. Instead, you can use Quicklaunch to select from a list of data sources that your administrator or workgroup expert has made available for you. A connection manager in Excel allows you to view all connections in a workbook and makes it easier to reuse a connection or to substitute a connection with another one.
New File Formats. Microsoft Office 2007 introduces new file formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, known as the Office Open XML formats. These new file formats facilitate integration with external data sources, and also offer reduced file sizes and improved data recovery. In Office Excel 2007, the default format for an Excel workbook is the Office Excel 2007 XML-based file format (.xlsx). Other available XML-based formats are the Office Excel 2007 XML-based and macro-enabled file format (.xlsm), the Office Excel 2007 file format for an Excel template (.xltx), and the Office Excel 2007 macro-enabled file format for an Excel template (.xltm). In addition to the new XML-based file formats, Office Excel 2007 also introduces a binary version of the segmented compressed file format for large or complex workbooks. This file format, the Office Excel 2007 Binary (or BIFF12) file format (.xls), can be used for optimal performance and backward compatibility.
Integration with Document Management Server. Excel Services can be integrated with Document Management Server to create a validation process around new Excel reports and workbook calculation workflow actions, such as a cell-based notification or a workflow process based on a complex Excel calculation. You can also use Document Management Server to schedule nightly recalculation of a complex workbook model.
Microsoft Excel 2010 includes a variety of enhancements over Excel 2007 related to analysis, PivotTables, efficiency, capacity, collaboration, and support for remote and mobile users. Enhancements include:
Enhanced Pattern and Trend Analysis
PivotTable Improvements
Increased User Productivity
More Capacity and Faster Performance
Better Collaboration
SharePoint Excel Services lets users share a single version of a workbooks via any web browser
Improved Support for Remote and Mobile Users
Decision Consultants can provide businesses located in Arizona, Colorado, Southern Nevada, Southern California and nationwide with experts to help deploy Microsoft Excel, integrate the software with popular applications such as Microsoft Word and Project, and supply 1-on-1 training.
Decision Consultants' staff of consultants can help your business build and maintain a secure, robust network and communications infrastructure to support your Microsoft Project solutions.
If you are looking for a Microsoft Project consulting specialist, call Decision Consultants at (855) 507-6747 or send an email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it