Top 10 benefits of Excel 2007

How the latest Excel can help you analyse information

Microsoft Office Excel 2007 is a powerful and widely used tool that helps people analyse information to make more informed decisions. Using Office Excel 2007 and Excel Services, you can share and manage your analysis and insight with co-workers, customers, and partners with greater confidence.

Here are the top 10 ways in which Office Excel 2007 can help you create spreadsheets and analyse, share, and manage information more effectively.

1. Office Excel 2007 features a new user interface to help you find powerful tools when you need them

Find the tools you want when you need them using the new results-oriented interface in Office Excel 2007. Based on the job you need to accomplish, whether it's creating a table or writing a formula, Office Excel 2007 presents the appropriate commands when you need them.

2. Import, organise, and explore massive data sets within significantly expanded spreadsheets

Work with massive amounts of data in Office Excel 2007, which supports spreadsheets that can be up to 1 million rows by 16,000 columns. In addition to the bigger grid, Office Excel 2007 supports multicore processor platforms for faster calculation of formula-intense spreadsheets.

3. Use the completely redesigned charting engine in Office Excel 2007 to communicate your analysis in professional-looking charts

Build professional-looking charts faster with fewer clicks using charting tools in the new user interface. Apply rich visual enhancements to your charts such as 3D effects, soft shadowing, and transparency. Create and interact with charts the same way, regardless of the application you are using, because the charting engine in Office Excel 2007 is consistent in Microsoft Office Word 2007 and Microsoft Office PowerPoint 2007.

4. Enjoy improved and powerful support for working with tables

Create, format, expand, filter, and refer to tables within formulas because Office Excel 2007 has greatly improved support for tables. When you're viewing data contained in a large table, Office Excel 2007 keeps table headings in view while you scroll.

5. Create and work with interactive PivotTable views with ease

PivotTable views enable you to quickly reorient your data to help you answer multiple questions. Find the answers you need faster and create and use PivotTable views more easily by dragging fields where you want them to be displayed.

6. "See" important trends and find exceptions in your data

Apply conditional formatting to your information more easily to discover patterns and highlight trends in your data. New schemes include colour gradients, heat maps, data bars, and performance indicator icons.

7. Use Office Excel 2007 and Excel Services to help share spreadsheets more securely with others

Excel Services, a feature of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, dynamically renders a spreadsheet as HTML so others can access the information using a Web browser. Because of the high degree of fidelity with the Office Excel 2007 client, Excel Services users can navigate, sort, filter, input parameters, and interact with the information, all within their Web browser.

8. Remove tracked changes, comments, and hidden text from your documents

Detect and remove unwanted comments, hidden text, or personally identifiable information using the Document Inspector to help ensure that sensitive information doesn't escape when your documents are published.

9. Reduce the size of spreadsheets and improve damaged file recovery at the same time

The new, compressed Microsoft Office Excel XML Format offers a dramatic reduction in file size, while its architecture offers an improvement in data recovery for damaged files. This new format provides a tremendous savings to storage and bandwidth requirements, and reduces the burden on IT personnel.

10. Extend your business intelligence investments because Office Excel 2007 provides full support for Microsoft SQL Server 2005 Analysis Services

Take advantage of the flexibility and the new cube functions in Office Excel 2007 to build a custom report from an OLAP database. You can also connect to external sources of data more easily using the Data Connection Library.

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