Just as with the majority of components within Office 2007, Excel uses the new ribbon interface.

The Home ribbon includes sections for font formatting, alignment, number and cell formatting, clipboard, search and filtering, and styles.

The last section contains a rather clever conditional formatting tool. This will come in handy if, for example, you have a table of numbers and want to highlight the cells according to their magnitude.

The traditional way to do this is to set up a rule for each range you want distinguished and then apply a distinctive format; background colour, for example. This takes a lot of time, and the formatting options are limited.

In Excel 2007 you can do this with two clicks, and have a choice of coloured shading, data bars or coloured icons – all with live preview.

Formulae share a ribbon with tools for managing named cells and auditing tools that check for errors or show a cell’s dependents or precedents. Charts take up the lion’s share of the insert ribbon, and they have their own pop-up ribbons for Design, Layout and Format.

Office’s other charts – organisational, process and Venn diagrams – have been reborn as SmartArt. Although probably most used in PowerPoint, they are available suite-wide.

In design terms they are a vast improvement on the previous clunky diagrams, and there are nearly 100 to choose from. As with other graphic elements they respect the colour scheme of the current theme.

The Data ribbon contains tools for advanced filtering and sorting, ‘What If’ analysis, links to other worksheets and importing data from other sources such as an SQL server.

Other improvements include size – the former worksheet limit of 256 columns and 65,536 rows has been extended to 16,384 and 1,048,576 respectively, which should satisfy the most avid power-user or aspiring millionaire.

To cope with this, Excel’s memory management has been increased from 1GB to 2GB and it now takes advantage of dual-core processors. As with Word and other suite members you can now save as a Pdf (Adobe Acrobat) document, or Microsoft’s own XPS format, formerly known as Metro.

This doesn’t come as standard, so you'll need to download the appropriate add-in and jump through the Office Genuine Advantage hoop to enable this.

Overall, Microsoft has done a good job with this Excel makeover and, thankfully, it doesn't suffer from the same problems as Word 2007 [/REVIEW LINK] when viewing multiple documents.

This article is part of our complete Microsoft Office 2007 review
Microsoft Office 2007 overview
Microsoft Word 2007 review
Microsoft Outlook 2007 review

See also
Microsoft Windows Vista review
Video review: Windows Vista

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Tesco Complete Office software suite
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Openoffice.org 2
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Zoho Virtual Office productivity software
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