Office "12" PROview: MS Excel
Office "12" Excel has a new design that makes one’s work with it easier, faster, and more efficient. As with the rest of the Office "12" suite the new "Ribbons" put the commands one uses most often in plain sight on the work surface instead of hidden in menus or dialog boxes. Complex formulas and charts can now be added and used, even by those of us who are not financially or mathematically inclined, to display the results of advanced data analysis, at the click of the mouse.
Each Command Tab has its own ribbon and the following Command Tabs are found in Office "12" Excel:
Sheet
The first tab on the left, it contains the everyday commands that people use the most, some of which used to be on the Standard and Formatting toolbars: Cut, Copy, and Paste, font commands, and commands to quickly format cells, in addition to the commands to insert or delete cells, columns, rows, and sheets.
Quick Access Toolbar
The Quick Access Toolbar is a small toolbar to the left of the Command Tabs. On it are buttons for the things that most people do all the time: Save, Undo, and Repeat. This can be customized in a number of different ways:
* By right-clicking the button you want and then clicking Add to Quick Access Toolbar.
* By clicking the command Customize Quick Access Toolbar, which appears either when you right-click any button or click the arrow at the end of the toolbar. Then, in the dialog box that opens, choose from the commands available.
* To move the toolbar to its own row below the "Ribbon", click Switch to large Quick Access Toolbar.
Insert
As the tab says, go here to insert things: charts, PivotTables, pictures, diagrams, symbols, and hyperlinks.
Page Layout
Prepare your worksheet for printing here. Change page orientation and margins, set print areas, turn gridlines on and off, and print headings.
Page Layout View
In this new view, you don't have to go to print preview to make adjustments to your worksheet before you print. It's easy to add headers and footers in Page layout view. As you type in the new header and footer area at the top or bottom of the page, the Headers & Footers tab opens with all the commands you need to create your headers and footers.
If you prefer to work in Normal view, click
Normal on the
Excel View Selector 
on the bottom of the screen.
Formulas
You can work with formulas no matter what tab you work on. Switch to the Formulas tab to work with more complex formulas, select functions, work with named cells and to do formula auditing.
Function Library
From the Function Library section of the Formulas ribbon, one is able to select advanced formulas to work with and is guided through selecting the cells containing the data to be used in the calculation.
Data
Get external data into Excel on this tab, sort and filter data, convert text to columns, do data validation, do What-If Analysis, and outline data.
Review
The commands to proof your worksheet, for adding comments, and for protecting and sharing your workbook are here.
Developer
The Developer tab has commands to work with macros and VBA codes, as well as XML maps. To see this tab, click
Excel Options on the bottom of the
File menu, click
Views, and then click the
Developer tools check box under
In all Office Applications, show.
File Formats
Changing to a default XML file format means that a number of improvements could be made in Excel:
Enable new features There are more columns and rows. The number of rows has gone from 65,536 to 1,048,576. The number of columns has increased from 256 to 16,384. You can write longer formulas in the new resizable formula bar. And if you click large chunks of text in a cell, the formula bar no longer spills into the worksheet grid.
Make files safer Excel XML Format make documents safer by separating files that contain scripts or macros. The Excel XML Format is made up of a collection of XML files wrapped into a simple, compressed file using ZIP technologies. The individual XML files are parts that, when put together in a ZIP file, make up an Excel Workbook.
Reduced file size When you save an Excel "12" file, it is compressed. This means that the file size will be approximately 50 percent to 75 percent smaller than a file saved in a previous version of Excel.
The new file formats include
(*.xlsx) the standard work book,
(code) (*.xlsm) used when the file contains macros or VBA code and
(*.xlsb) which saves a work book in binary format and is used for particularly large spread sheets.
In-house
Also see:
Office "12" PROview: MS Access
Office "12" PROview: MS Word
Office "12" PROview: MS InfoPath
