Microsoft Excel 2007 Tutorial
- Replacing about 80 percent of the File menu in older versions of Excel is the new Microsoft Office Button, a circular button with the Microsoft Office logo on it. Clicking on this will give options for opening a new file, saving a file in different formats, printing the file and sharing the file. Added to this are functions that used to be part of add-ons for Excel, such as publishing the file to a Web server and keeping a local copy synchronized. At the bottom of the menu are two buttons, Exit Excel and Excel Options, where a number of Excel configuration options reside.
- The user interface for Excel 2007 is now made up of several tabs, labeled "Home," "Insert," "Page Layout," "Formulas," "Data," "Review," "View" and "Developer." Each tab pulls up a grouping of large icons, designed to be readable on larger, high-definition monitors, that can be clicked easily with a mouse. Most of these icon groups put related tasks together. For example, on the "Formulas" tab, the functions for different sorts of related functions are close together, along with a Name Manager for managing named ranges of cells, as well as formula auditing.
- The Excel formula bar has also seen a significant upgrade in the 2007 interface; it can now be expanded and contracted at will, and gives you a significantly longer formula region. It's underneath the icon groupings of the Office Fluent Ribbon. Underneath the formula bar are the data cells that are the heart and soul of working with Excel, and they have not changed from earlier versions of Excel. Formulas are still prepended with an equal sign, and you can format them as needed.
- Excel (and the other Office applications) come with new default fonts. Because of how Excel measures column widths and row heights, this can cause some printing boundaries to change by a column or two. The new default font for Excel is Calibri, which is a bit wider across the width of a "0" than Arial is. The width of a column in Excel's internal measuring units is based on the number of "0" characters; prior versions of Excel used Arial as the default font. Another interesting change is the greater prominence that conditional formatting is given, including a lot of prepackaged options for business and statistical usage.
