Excel® 2010 Workbook for Dummies®

Chapter 23. Top Ten Features in Excel 2010

In This Chapter

• Formatting and editing from the Home tab

• Creating charts from the Insert tab

• Discovering Style Galleries

If you're looking for a quick rundown on what's new and what's cool in Excel 2010, look no further! Here it is — my official Top Ten Features list. Just a cursory glance down the list tells you that the thrust of the features is graphics, graphics, graphics!

The Excel Ribbon and Backstage View

The Ribbon is the heart of the Excel 2010 user interface. Based on a core of standard tabs, various so-called contextual tabs are added as needed in formatting and editing of specific elements (such as data tables, charts, pivot tables, and graphic objects). The Ribbon brings together almost every command you're going to need when performing particular tasks in Excel. Go to Exercises 1-1 and 1-2 in Chapter 1 for basic practice in locating and selecting commands on the Excel Ribbon. Better yet, Excel 2010 for the first time enables you to customize the Ribbon through the creation of your own custom tabs complete with whatever groups of buttons you need to get your work done.

In addition to the Ribbon in the regular worksheet view, Excel 2010 introduces a new Backstage View opened by clicking the File Menu button that now appears to the immediate left of the first tab of the Ribbon. In Backstage View, you find panels attached to the six major File menu options — Info, Recent, New, Print, Save & Send, and Help. These panels bring together ...