MA TE RI AL The Four-One-One of Excel TE D To Do List CO PY RI GH Figure out where Excel came from (yawn!) Beautify the data Share the work of art Satisfy yourself with a Soy Chai Latte
I f you looked up “Excel” on Wikipedia, you’d find a blurb about a spreadsheet program called “Multiplan,” released in 1982. Excel has come a long way since then, thanks in part to competition from Lotus 1-2-3. By 1988 Excel started to outsell Lotus 1-2-3, and since then Microsoft has regularly released updates. Soon, Microsoft became the leader in personal computer software development. You, too, can become the Excel Diva with a bit of practice and consistent application.
Excel 2007: The Louis Vuitton of Spreadsheets So are you ready to look at Excel 2007 with new eyes? You should look at Excel the same way you look at the shoe department in Nordstrom’s or the feeling you got when you went to a candy store as a kid. There is no other way. The enhancements in this version are so COOL you can’t help but be excited about it and share with your friends. (At least, if you’re an IT Girl you can’t!) The gist of it is that you can do more with less time.
What Excel Can Do for You With all the changes in Excel 2007 it’s important to bond. It’s important to spend time with Excel 2007 and learn a few key terms. Let’s begin with the “Office Pearl.” It’s not just another pearl to add to your necklace, it’s the Office logo on the top-left corner of the Microsoft Excel 2007 screen (Figure 1-1).
Excel Can Beautify Your Data We all like to spend more time with things that are beautiful or pleasing to the eye. We ladies already know this. So Excel 2007 has just the thing. New key features, such as Format as Table located on the Styles section of the Home tab (Figure 1-3), allow you to make your work look beautiful and helpful, impressing your boss and your coworkers while making complex information easier to understand.
Select Data Bars or other formats here. Figure 1-4 Figure 1-5 There are so many new things, and old things that are now done better, that it is hard to pick and choose. By far my favorite, and probably the most important in terms of improving the look of your data, is the robust SmartArt feature (Figure 1-6). All the guys in the office always wonder how I make my presentations look so good. All the well-known diagrams are there, but now they have a more sophisticated and chic look.
SmartArt feature Figure 1-6 The presentation piece of Excel has always been a bit hard and frankly most of the tools were not really there, or if they were they were hard to find. In Excel 2003, you could have a maximum of 56 different colors in your workbook (see the Geek Facts 1.1 sidebar). Also, there was just no easy way to make sure the colors looked good together, unless you spent countless time and had your graphic artist friends help you.
PowerPoint 2007 now use the Microsoft Excel 2007 charting engine, making creating charts much easier and more powerful within those applications too. So you can take the charts you create in Excel 2007 into PowerPoint 2007 and Word 2007 for great presentations and reports. You heard it here first! A common format choice Figure 1-7 Geek Facts 1.1 How about the geeky cool things? Now you can show off your geek-skills: Excel 2007 can hold more than 1 million rows of data.
Excel Formulas: It All Adds Up! Just for you... There is a little hovering box that describes what the function does (Figure 1-8). This frees up your brain from having to remember all the names of the functions you use, so you can have more idle time in your brain to think about what other cool things you could be doing. Ever remember getting frustrated trying to type Excel functions? If you are new you probably don’t even know where to begin.
One of the most common requests from corporations that have utilized Excel was to find the average value of cells where the cell met a certain criteria. So for those of you looking at your monthly budget and you want to find out where you spend more than $500 every month (probably at the Louis Vuitton store!), this is a great place to start. After you enter all your expenses you can use the cool new formulas the Excel 2007 team has created to summarize your data given a certain condition.
Figure 1-9 Save options Figure 1-10 Review Before You Print Now you know the value that has been added into Excel 2007, but how about printing? After all your effort you’d like to share your work with your colleagues and manager. With Excel 97 there was something called Page Break Preview view, which helped you see (in a small font, which you couldn’t really read) what your work would look like.
on a printed page; and add and edit headers and footers, so you can put the confidential lines, page numbers, and dates in that you forgot. And most importantly, edit your data. Click here to see the Page Layout view. Figure 1-11 Online Help There is ample help inside Excel 2007, but if you need more for the project you are doing, there is also ample help online. You can click on the question mark on the top-right side of the screen (Figure 1-12). Find help here.
Figure 1-12 shows a great place to find help about anything you are trying to do. You can also visit http://Office.Microsoft.com, where you will find the same Ribbon feel and be able to navigate to get the updates and help you need. For updates you can click on the Office Pearl and go down to the Excel options. When you click on Excel 2007 Options, the Excel Options window appears (Figure 1-13). From this window you can select Resources from the left side and check for updates online.
You have made it through the first chapter. Hopefully you’re inspired and looking at your favorite handbag with a whole new perspective. You’ve learned about some of the coolest new features in Excel 2007 and are ready to move on to something new. Reward yourself with a soy Chai latte. Did you know the word Chai is Farsi, and it means tea? For those of you who have seen it with the Indian culture, yes, the same word in India is used to mean “tea with milk.
