Progent's Experts Team

Microsoft Excel has been available for more than a quarter century and for nearly all that time has been the world's most popular spreadsheet software. Excel's programmability, connectivity, and rich feature set have allowed it to become a popular development platform and Excel is now used to power custom and commercial applications of every imaginable type and in all industries.

In addition to being deployed as an out-of-the-box spreadsheet, Excel is widely used as a front-end to sophisticated data analysis and decision support programs built with Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and connected to powerful databases such as SQL Server. VBA is also a popular tool for creating custom macros that add to Excel's already extensive library of functions. In addition, Excel is often deployed as a number-crunching back-end to custom applications that can be quickly built with popular products such as Microsoft Access, or as an easily-maintained database for generating individualized form letters or emails with Microsoft Word. Excel's versatility is enhanced further by its ability to connect to real-time data sources through interfaces like DDE and RTD, allowing Excel to be used for monitoring events such as changes in equity prices.

Progent's Microsoft-certified application experts offer a broad range of online services to help you design, program, deploy, manage, and troubleshoot applications based on any version of Excel. Progent can also help you migrate to newer Excel releases, including the latest 64-bit version, and offers cost-effective online webinar training classes in Excel that can be customized for individuals or groups.

Microsoft Excel 2007
Microsoft Office Excel 2007 is a powerful tool you can use to create and format spreadsheets, and analyze and share information to make more informed decisions. With the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, rich data visualization, and PivotTable views, professional-looking charts are easier to create and use than in Excel 2003. Office Excel 2007, combined with Excel Services, a technology included with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, provides significant improvements for sharing data with greater security. You can share sensitive business information more broadly with enhanced security with your coworkers, customers, and business partners. By sharing a spreadsheet using Office Excel 2007 and Excel Services, you can navigate, sort, filter, input parameters, and interact with PivotTable views directly on the Web browser.

Excel 2007 features significant improvements over Excel 2003. These include:

• Results-oriented User Interface. A results-oriented user interface makes it easy to work in Microsoft Office Excel 2007. Commands and features that were often buried in complex menus in Excel 2003 and toolbars are easier to find on task-oriented tabs that contain logical groups of commands and features. Many dialog boxes are replaced with drop-down galleries that display the available options, and descriptive tooltips or sample previews are provided to help you choose the right option.
• More Rows, Columns, and Other Limits. Excel 2007 supports up to 1 million rows and 16 thousand columns per worksheet. This represents 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns than Excel 2003. Instead of 4 thousand types of formatting, you can use an unlimited number in the same workbook, and the number of cell references per cell are increased from 8 thousand to limited by available memory. For improved performance, memory management has been increased from 1 GB of memory in Microsoft Office Excel 2003 to 2 GB in Office Excel 2007. Because Office Excel 2007 supports multiple processors and multithreaded chipsets, calculations are faster in large, formula-intensive worksheets.
• Rich Conditional Formatting. In Excel 2007, conditional formatting lets you visually annotate your data for both analytical and presentation purposes. To find exceptions and to spot important trends in your data, you can implement and manage multiple conditional formatting rules that apply rich visual formatting in the form of gradient colors, data bars, and icon sets to data that meets those rules.
• Easy Formula Writing. Improvements in formula writing include a resizable formula bar with more levels of nesting, function autocomplete for completing formula arguments, the ability to manage multiple named ranges in a central location, and structured references. In addition to cell references, Office Excel 2007 provides structured references that reference named ranges and tables in a formula.
• OLAP Formulas and Cube Functions. When you work with multidimensional databases (such as SQL Server Analysis Services) in Office Excel 2007, you can use OLAP formulas to build complex, free form, OLAP data bound reports. Cube functions are used to extract OLAP data (sets and values) from Analysis Services and display it in a cell. OLAP formulas can be generated when you convert PivotTable formulas to cell formulas or when you use AutoComplete for cube function arguments when you type formulas.
• Improved Sorting and Filtering. In Office Excel 2007, you can quickly arrange your worksheet data to find the answers that you need by using enhanced filtering and sorting. For example, you can sort data by color and by more than 3 (and up to 64) levels. You can also filter data by color or by dates, display more than 1000 items in the AutoFilter drop-down list, select multiple items to filter, and filter data in PivotTables.
• Excel Table Enhancement. The Excel 2007 user interface makes it easy to create, format, and expand an Excel table (known as an Excel list in Excel 2003) to organize the data on your worksheet. Improved functionality for tables includes table header rows, calculated columns, automatic AutoFiltering, structured references, total rows, and table styles.
• Shared Charting. In Office 2007, charting is shared between Excel, Word, and PowerPoint. Rather than using Microsoft Graph for charting, Word and PowerPoint 2007 incorporate the charting features of Excel. Because an Excel worksheet is used as the chart data sheet for Word and PowerPoint charts, shared charting provides more functionality to Excel, including the use of formulas, filtering, sorting, and the ability to link a chart to external data sources, such as Microsoft SQL Server and Analysis Services (OLAP), for up-to-date information in your chart. The Excel worksheet that contains the data of your chart can be stored in your Word document or PowerPoint presentation, or in a separate file to reduce the size of your documents.
• Easy-to-use PivotTables. In Excel 2007, PivotTables are easier to use than in earlier versions of Excel. By using the PivotTable user interface, the information you want to view about your data is just a few clicks away—you no longer have to drag data to drop zones that aren't always an easy target. Instead, you can select the fields that you want to see in a PivotTable field list.
• Quick Connections to External Data. In Excel 2007, you do not need to know the server or database names of corporate data sources. Instead, you can use Quicklaunch to select from a list of data sources that your administrator or workgroup expert has made available for you. A connection manager in Excel allows you to view all connections in a workbook and makes it easier to reuse a connection or to substitute a connection with another one.
• Additional File Formats. Microsoft Office 2007 introduced additional file formats for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, known as the Office Open XML formats. These file formats facilitate integration with external data sources, and also offer reduced file sizes and improved data recovery. In Excel 2007, the default format for an Excel workbook is the Office Excel 2007 XML-based file format (.xlsx). Other available XML-based formats are the Excel 2007 XML-based and macro-enabled file format (.xlsm), the file format for an Excel template (.xltx), and the macro-enabled file format for an Excel template (.xltm). In addition to the XML-based file formats, Office Excel 2007 also introduces a binary version of the segmented compressed file format for large or complex workbooks. This file format, the Office Excel 2007 Binary (or BIFF12) file format (.xls), can be used for optimal performance and backward compatibility.
• Integration with Document Management Server. Excel Services can be integrated with Document Management Server to create a validation process around Excel reports and workbook calculation workflow actions, such as a cell-based notification or a workflow process based on a complex Excel calculation. You can also use Document Management Server to schedule nightly recalculation of a complex workbook model.

Microsoft Excel 2010
Microsoft Excel 2010 includes a variety of enhancements over Excel 2007 related to analysis, PivotTables, efficiency, capacity, collaboration, and support for remote and mobile users. Enhancements include:

• Enhanced Pattern and Trend Analysis
  – Sparklines summarize data via miniature charts in a single cell next to your text data
  – Slicers give a concise visual summary of PivotTable and PivotChart views and CUBE functions
  – PivotChart displays different data views for analysis independent of PivotTable views
  – Conditional Formatting makes it easier to spot critical information
  
• PivotTable Improvements
  – Multithreading improves performance for PivotTable data retrieval, sorting, and filtering
  – What-if Analysis allows conditional PivotTable editing and sharing via OLAP or Analysis Services cube
  – Named sets tool allows creation of PivotTables that change based on dynamic filter sets
  – For OLAP PivotTable users, dynamic rendering is supported by using the filter in the matrix
  
• Increased User Productivity
  – More efficient navigation based on the Microsoft Fluent user interface and Microsoft Office Ribbon
  – The new Search Filter accelerates searching in tables, PivotChart and PivotTable views
  – The Backstage View improves file recovery and provides centralized workbook management
  
• More Capacity and Faster Performance
  – Excel 2010's support for 64-bit computing breaks through the 2 Gbyte dataset limit of Excel 2007
  – The free PowerPivot add-in speeds up modeling and analyzing very large, multi-source data sets
  
• Better Collaboration
  – Excel Web App allows people to edit the same workbook simultaneously via any Web browser
  – SharePoint Foundation 2010 allows collaboration on workbooks from within the firewall
  – Partners and consultants can use Windows Live ID for simultaneous workbook authoring
  – SharePoint Excel Services lets users share a single version of a workbooks via any web browser
  
• Improved Support for Remote and Mobile Users
  – Excel Mobile allows editing and viewing workbooks, including charts, from a Windows 7 smartphone
  – Microsoft Excel Web App allows location-independent workbook editing
  

Progent's Cisco-certified CCIE engineers can help you set up a secure and dependable network infrastructure that supports users inside and outside your firewall, and Progent's Hyper-V experts and VMware consultants can show you how to consolidate hardware, streamline management, and improve fault-tolerance and recoverability by setting up virtual servers enhanced with cluster technology. Progent's certified network security engineers can help you evaluate the security and compliance of your Excel environment, establish and enforce security policies based on industry best practices, and design a disaster recover strategy that maximizes the availability of your Excel-powered applications. Progent can also provide affordable webinar training classes for Excel that are customized for the specific needs of individuals or groups within your organization.

Contact Progent for Microsoft Office Excel Consulting
If you are looking for a Microsoft Excel consulting specialist, call Progent at 800-993-9400 or send email to experts@progent.com.

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