When launching any major new software application, it's confident that fellowships will get a few things wrong - so it was with Excel 2007. Microsoft has now corrected a join of mistakes with Excel 2010 and introduced a join of new features, but there aren't too many differences. Read straight through this record and see if you agree!
Return of the File menu
In Excel 2007 you had to use the Office button to open, close and save workbooks, which confused delegates on our training courses (and us...). Microsoft has now reinstated a File menu, disguised as a File tab on the ribbon. Now can we have a Print tab too please...?
Customisable Ribbons
In Excel 2003 you could originate as many distinct toolbars as you like, but it wasn't all the time easy to manage. In Excel 2007 Microsoft decided that less was more, and only allowed users to add tools to the default quick entrance toolbar (although if you knew Xml there was a way round this). With Excel 2010 we're back to a happy compromise: users can customise the default quick entrance toolbar, but they can also originate their own ribbon tabs.
Sparklines
Sparklines are little graphs, which appear within a singular cell.
Imagine that you are looking at a table of data. For each row you see a company's name in column 1, followed by 12 months of sales data (one form per month). You could then originate a sparkline in column 14 graphing sales for this enterprise over the 12 month period, and copy this cell down to show the same chart for each company. A nice idea, but we can't see it having a huge impact.
Slicers
Slicers are one of those ideas which we hope will quietly be forgotten in the next version of Excel. The idea is that they originate an easier way to look at distinct sets of pivot table data. The question is, easier than what? The previous default way - using page fields - was already so easy to use that we plainly can't believe that there is room for this cumbersome add-in.
There are other features in Excel such as the potential to take screenshots and a larger maximum file size, but if you've got Excel 2007 we don't think it's worth the upgrade.
Microsoft Excel 2010 - New Features in Ms Excel 2010