20 New Features: Office 2010 Preview : Excel Sparklines

By Mary Branscombe , published on July 15, 2009 at 3:00 PM
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Most of the new features in Excel are about visualizing data to make it easier to understand. Sparklines are miniature charts that you can put into a cell  if you have a big table of figures. Rather than making a chart that covers all the figures that sits somewhere else on the worksheet, you can put a bar chart or a trend line into the last row or column of the table. That way you can see exactly what’s happening in the numbers, all of which you can see at the same time.

PivotTables are the best way to drill into big spreadsheets, but they’ve never been easy to use. PivotCharts are a lot simpler–think of an interactive chart with dropdowns that let you change which portion of your data you’re including in the graph. A new tool called Slicers makes it easier to split PivotTables and PivotCharts up so that you can compare different views of the information on the same worksheet. These are tools designed for business but they’re getting much simpler to work with. Whether you analyze benchmarks, sports results, or anything else with a lot of data, you won’t need a doctorate to understand them.
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Comments
burnley14 07/16/2009 6:34 AM
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I'm very pleased to see these changes . . .

But it's going to be hard to justify the upgrade from Office 2007, especially now that most of this is going to be available free online.

engrpiman 07/18/2009 3:54 PM
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That was an ok read. But my first questions is : does anyone willingly use outlook? I used outlook for years and then I discovered thunderbird.

Also did microsoft address the issue of the equation editor in powerpoint? They added the nice equation editor in word but it was missing from powerpoint.

Platypus 07/19/2009 2:48 AM
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Can we just go back to having "File" and "Edit" at the top? All these tabs and circular buttons are giving me headaches. I honestly don't require large icons for every little command in the program. I am quite capable of reading. It's like trying to decipher heiroglyphics.

jacobdrj 07/20/2009 11:54 PM
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The original system was not any more logical. Only difference is that people are used to it. Let them get used to this. It doesn't really matter to me. Overall, 07 was a big leap forward from 2003 from a functionality standpoint and from a integration standpoint. Little things like the equation builder and the page break are just a lot easier to deal with between office programs.

digital anomaly 07/22/2009 12:41 PM
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jacobdrj :
The original system was not any more logical. Only difference is that people are used to it. Let them get used to this. It doesn't really matter to me. Overall, 07 was a big leap forward from 2003 from a functionality standpoint and from a integration standpoint. Little things like the equation builder and the page break are just a lot easier to deal with between office programs.

I agree with you. Office 2007 was what Office should have been to begin with. Everything is properly grouped and neatly organized. People was just so used to the old interface (I myself included) that they got confused with the new Office. But if you take each product and compare them side by side, I'd say 2007 is definitely the winner. I'm looking forward to what 2010 has to offer.

@engrpiman: A lot of companies use Outlook primarily because they run Exchange servers. For a normal consumer, they usually have Office Home/Student installed and won't have Outlook to begin with.

Anonymous 07/23/2009 2:29 AM
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@engrpiman: actually, I'm a big Outlook fan. I have to deal with a huge amount of email, I want my calendar and contacts right there, I want them to sync to my WinMo phone, I use folders via the wonderful SpeedFiler add-in, I use categories and flags extensively, I sync folders from SharePoint, I use a lot of rules - if you want the full range of tools for contacts, calendar and communications, (and you have Exchange to make the features work, block spam etc) Outlook is great. If you just want an email package there are lots of other tools that may indeed suit you better.

And yes, PowerPoint 2010 has the same equation editor as Word 2010; a lot more of the tools are common between the apps in this version,

tryceo 07/25/2009 6:59 PM
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I guess its cool looks better for the newer PCs

D_Kuhn 07/29/2009 8:01 PM
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I hope they improve the performance, I'm slowly getting used to the new GUI... and I really like some of the fundamental improvements (like the elimination of the 256 column limit in Excel)... but they added some issues in the process.

Graphing for instance, if you graph something with more than a handful of points - and change the formatting (like making line width 1 instead of the fat lines they seem to prefer), Excel slows to a crawl even on the fastest systems. I've seen the problem on a $10,000 workstation with 32gig of ram graphing a single trace of a few thousand points... something earlier Excel versions managed without a hiccup.

prakalejas 08/15/2009 9:18 AM
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The best thing about 2010 office is that it comes as x64 version (at last), looking forward for some performance gains. Tested on windows 7 - works like a charm.
I mainly use Excel, which actually works faster than OpenOffice scalc. Ribbon bar is a mess - I hate it everytime I need to use it.
Outlook sux, I use way much better application - theBat.

It looks like microsoft decided to strike the world with win7 and office2010, which really has good potentials (mainly because of x64 performance gains) :-)

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