First impressions of Office 2007 - Excel
I've been using Excel 2007 for about a month now and am I am strarting to
love it.
Ok so I suffered from the "Where the hell do I find option x" syndrome due to
the new ribbon bar, but, as I had heard before, this is a short term issue, you
will eventually understand how the options are configured and be able to find
things very easily.
This brings me to my first observation, the Ribbon bar. The way the ribbon
bar is configured does provide a much greater surface area for items, this means
that most items are only 2 clicks away. More importantly I have found many of
the options I use frequently are now accessible in 1 click compared to 5 or
more before. This includes, "Wrap text" , vertical text position and
standard formatting.
It is obvious that the standard office toolbars haven't changed much over the
years and the development of the Ribbon has been influenced
by feedback from users so that the most used items are easily
accessible.
The second major observation is formatting. This has taken a huge leap and is
just great, especially when dealling with large sets of data, where the addition
of vsiuals makes the data stand out from the page without the user having to
read every value.
Whats more I am someone that used conditional formatting extensively.
Previously this was stuck deep away in a menu, it is now an option
directly on the ribbon and provides access to builtin formatting and also a
means by which you can customise the formatting. If you've been to any demos of
Office 2007 or even BI in SQL Server 2005 you will have seen the data bars,
color scales and icon sets.
Finally functions, I haven't looked at depth into what new functions are
available I just know that 2 that have appeared are COUNTIFS and SUMIFS. These
allow you to specify multiple criteria for suming and counting a range.
-