More Room, More Speed, More Choices

Some of the changes in Office Excel 2007 will be most important for power users who create, update, modify, and report on mega worksheets that demand the utmost in processing power and speed. Here’s an overview of some of the changes that affect the way Office Excel 2007 manages and supports large, complex worksheets.

If you were maxxing out the row and column limits of Office Excel 2003, you’ll be glad to know that the Office Excel 2007 worksheet has been greatly enlarged. According to David Gainer, Group Program Manager for Microsoft Office Excel, “Specifically, the Excel 12 grid will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That’s 1,500 percent more rows and 6,30 percent more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV.”^[1]

^[1] For more information about the changes in Office Excel 2007, see David Gainer’s blog at blogs.msdn.com/excel/archive/2005/09/23/473185.aspx.

And even on huge, formula-intensive worksheets you will experience faster calculations because Office Excel 2007 now supports dual processors and multithreaded chipsets, which enable Office Excel 2007 to take full advantage of your system’s processing power and dramatically reduce your wait time. Another speed booster: The memory management in Office Excel 2007 has been increased from 1 GB to 2 GB, giving you more room to work with complex, sophisticated spreadsheets that previously maxxed out your system resources.

Additionally, Office Excel 2007 moves the bar on some of the limits in the earlier version; for example, now you can set unlimited formatting in the same workbook (this used to be capped at 4,000 format types). The color palette of Office Excel 2007 has grown to support the full 16 million colors, and now you can create as many cell references to a single cell as your computer’s memory will allow (this used to be limited to 8,000 references per cell).