Excel shows ribbon development

TODAY WE'RE we're examining Excel 2007 in more detail, after our look at Microsoft's Word 2007 that appeared in yesterday's INQUIRER here.

The first thing that caught our eye after using Word was the increased interface consistency between the various applications within the suite. Microsoft has long striven to ensure that the GUI is as common as possible between its Office apps, but this is easily the most consistent suite interface yet. Unfortunately, this means that if you have several applications open, you'll often need to double-check what you've actually got open in front of you.

'Formulas' and 'Data' are the Excel-specific permanent ribbon headers that appear in the new-look interface. From the Formulas ribbon a selection of formula types is categorized for quick-use, along with other formula-specific functions.

Within the Data section, a selection of tools allows for the insertion of data from a variety of sources, including Access, the web, text files and 'other' sources including connections to a SQL source and XML data files.

'Home' - text and table/cell formatting, 'Insert' - shapes, graph and art insertion, 'Page Layout' - page formatting and document theming, 'Review' - document locking, comments and changes, and 'View' ribbons are all largely unchanged from Word - a convincing sign of a unified interface.

File size limitations surprisingly crop up quite frequently in larger Excel work-books. Excel 2007 certainly changes this, with support rising to a massive 16,384 columns and a staggering 1,048,576 rows - up from 256 columns and 65,536 rows, respectively. That's 1,500 per cent more rows and 6,300 per cent more columns than in Excel 2003. For those that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV.

Maximum system memory is now limited to that allowed by Windows, as opposed the previously hard-coded limit of 1Gb. Further limitations and statistics can be found here.

Graphing in Excel 2007 has been revamped using a new charting engine - which includes support for advanced formatting such as 3D rendering, transparencies and shadows. It really does look very, very good and changing from one graphing technique to another is easily done with a simple selection and a click of a button. The graphing art utilises the underlying Office 'Shapes' technology that enables great looking automatically created art for insertion into your documents. It really is as simple as selecting a table of data and clicking the graphical display of your choice.

Excel will then automatically embed a graph of your underlying data, attempting to guess what values should appear where and performing the related correlations. On selecting to insert a graph a 'Chart Tools' headed ribbon-set will appear, giving access to the further ribbons 'Design, Layout, Format'. From each of these ribbon selections a single-click selection of icons can revamp your graph from a variety of different designs, themes, colours and layouts, all done incredibly effortlessly thanks to the new ribbon-based GUI.

The interface really is very effective in option-heavy areas such as this, where a variety of possibilities are instantly at your fingerprints for quick selection. This frequently allows a trial and error type way of working - instead of leaving the formatting as is, due to the usual complexities involving change, you can quickly preview (and undo) any changes present from the omnipresent ribbon choices.

Another upgrade to 2007 is the 'Conditional Formatting' feature which includes support for three main features: 'Colour Scales', 'Icon Sets' and 'Data Bars'. 'Colour Scales', automatically format the background of a group of cells with different colours according to the values - a much extended version of what has come previously, which mainly focused on the text formatting. 'Icon Sets' precede any text in a cell with an icon that represents an aspect of the value of the cell with respect to other values in a pre-defined selection of data - this looks highly effective and allows immediate inspection of value-change without the necessity of an accompanying graph.

'Data Bars' show the value of the cell compared to the rest of its group, as a gradient bar in the background of a cell - again highly useful and sure to be an effective tool for anyone preparing an Excel-based presentation.

Previous editions of Excel allowed 52 shades of colour within the embedded document shapes and graphs. This has been extended to use a full 32-bit colour palette (4.3billion colours). This should allow for full colour customisation of documents by you arty types.

The full underlying changes of this upgrade aren't going to be seen without a lot of further use in real-world scenarios using complex data-sets from multiple sources of information. But from face-value and some brief intense use, we're again impressed by the transition that has occurred between Excel 2003 and 2007, as we were with Word. The 'Ribbon' interface works incredibly well in Excel as it did in Word and can only benefit end-users productivity, as well as the quality of their documents. ?

L'Inq
David Gainer's blog