Chapter 5. Extend Your Insight with Office Excel 2007

What you’ll find in this chapter

• The design of the Office Excel 2007 window

• Page layout: A better view for printing

• More room, more speed, more choices

• Create better worksheets, faster

• Share workbooks and manage information with Excel Services

• PivotTables views—more support, better insight

For many people, Microsoft^® Office Excel^® 2007 is one of those programs you grow into. Unless their job responsibilities demand a detailed working knowledge of spreadsheets right from the start, their earliest experiences with Office Excel 2007 might have been creating simple financial documents—maybe in response to a request from a manager, a need in their own business, or a question from a financial advisor.

Over the years, Office Excel has evolved from a basic spreadsheet tool to a major business application that enables information workers to create, analyze, consolidate, report on, and share critical information that affects the entire business life cycle. This is not your grandmother’s calculator! Office Excel 2007 faces the same challenge that Microsoft^® Office Word 2007 takes on: offering powerful, sophisticated tools in an accessible way that enables both experts and novices to find what they need easily and produce professional-quality, accurate, and insightful results.

The major changes in Office Excel 2007 offer exciting possibilities that can simplify and extend the way users create, work with, and share financial documents—spreadsheets, workbooks, reports, and more. Specifically, the additions and enhancements in Office Excel 2007 help users create better spreadsheets faster; understand, visualize, and share important information more easily with others; and make data analysis easier and more effective, resulting in better insight for those decisions that affect the bottom line. This chapter introduces some of these significant changes.