Basic excel Environment

The User Interface (UI) of Excel 2007 is called as Fluent. Microsoft office Fluent is a common UI presented in Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Access. Components of Fluent Fluent has many components like Ribbon, MS-Office button, Mini Toolbar and Quick access toolbar. The MS Office button is a replacement of File menu in 2003. It can be activates by Alt+F key.

Office button and Quick access toolbar The Ribbon is a replacement for all the other menus and toolbars. It is a banner that occupies the top of the window. Its design is tab based and the corresponding options and icons are displayed whenever the tab is selected.

The Ribbon

The icons under each tab are grouped logically into blocks on the Ribbon, and only the most frequently-used command icons are displayed. In case more options need to be displayed, a small link at the bottom of the block can be clicked to pop out a separate window containing all the options. Besides the preset tabs, context-sensitive tabs appear on the Ribbon depending on the object selected. For example, tabs relating to charts like Design, Layout, and Formatonly appear after a chart is created or selected. Trainer Yogita Vartak Page 1

The Mini Toolbar pops up on selecting a particular cells contents. When dealing with a block of cells, it pops up next to the context menu, on right-clicking. The Mini Toolbar contains the frequently-used formatting options, and significantly decreases the mouse navigation involved. Options in the Mini Toolbar include font changes, numbering and bulleting, and more.

The Mini Toolbar The configurable Quick Access Toolbar appears at the top left, next to the Office Button. It is a placeholder to add buttons for easy one-click access. If required, buttons can be added to or deleted from the toolbar, by using the adjacent Customize button. The Toolbar by default has a file save, undo, and redo buttons.

The Quick Access Toolbar

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Features

Live Preview Live Preview is a useful feature in the new UI. Unlike earlier versions where the results of formatting would be visible only after they were applied, in this version, just hovering the cursor over a formatting option will reflect the change in the content.

Formula AutoComplete This feature makes it easier to work with functions. Every time the user begins to start typing out a function, a pop up appears below the cell listing all function starting with that letter. The highlighted function has a brief definition alongside. The function list can be scrolled using the Up and Down direction keys, and after the desired function has been identified, it can be inserted into the cell using the [Tab] key. Internal changes Besides the changes in the interface, the computational limits of Excel have been pushed further. The number of rows and columns have been increased to 1048576 and 16384 respectively. Contrast this with the earlier limits of 65536 rows and 256 columns. To be able to handle this larger spreadsheet, MS Office now is able to use up all the RAM supported by the OS (4 GB in case of a 32-bit OS; specifically, in Excel, there is a 2 GB limit), compared to the previous maximum of 1 GB. And the software has also been optimized or multi-threaded to make better use of multi-core CPUs. File Type

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To store documents, Office 2007 now uses the Office XML format, which is based on XML (eXtensible Markup Language), a platform independent and open-standard language. Any application that can work with XML, irrespective of the operating system or system hardware, can be used to work with Office documents saved in the new format. The new file formats also use ZIP technology to compress files. Microsoft claims that a document saved in the new format will be up to 75 per cent smaller than when stored in the previous format. Excel workbooks are by default now saved in the XLSX format. This file format doesnt support the execution of macros, and therefore is not advisable in case a spreadsheet contains them. The XLTX format is used to store template spreadsheets that do not support macros. The other format, which supports macros, is XLSM. Spreadsheet templates containing macro code are saved as XSTM files. By creating distinct file formats for macro-including files, it has now become easier to identify such files before opening them. For compatibility with the previous versions, the XLS format needs to be used.

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