By Dean Pullen: Wednesday 28 June 2006, 12:01
Excerpts "..........TODAY WE'RE we're examining Excel 2007 in more detail.
'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.
'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.
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. µ