Excel Hacks, 2nd Edition

Preface

Millions of Microsoft Excel users are busy creating and sharing spreadsheets every day. Indeed, the spreadsheet has grown from a powerful convenience to a transformative foundation for many businesses, driving decision-making around the planet.

Although Excel is a critical tool, many Excel users know only about a subset of its functionality. They utilize the pieces they need, often reusing more complex pieces from existing templates, and don’t dive too deeply into everything Excel has to offer. Odds are good that no single user actually needs every feature in Excel, so this approach is pretty reasonable. At the same time, though, it means a lot of people never get far enough along the learning curve to see the techniques they can use to make their work much easier.

With the release of MS Office 2007 comes a new version of Excel. There are many changes with Excel 2007, the most obvious being the new user interface. The introduction of the ribbon provides a results-oriented interface that presents tools when you need them, in a clear and organized fashion. The size of a spreadsheet has also been greatly increased, with the number of columns now well over 16,000 and the number of rows over 1,000,000. The total amount of memory that Excel can use has also been increased and is limited only by the maximum available memory Windows will allow on your PC.

Other improvements include easier use of PivotTables, conditional formatting and named ranges, live visual previews, predefined ...