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