A Roomier Look in Microsoft Excel 2013

The all new layout of Microsoft Excel 2013 is less crowded than before, with much more open space than previous versions contained. The reason is both functional as well as having a secondary, aesthetic appeal that users are finding to their liking.

This extra space facilitates easier access on mobile devices as well as makes touch screen input more convenient. Now, mobile devices have a Microsoft Excel that they can carry around with them for the same easy input as computer users have always enjoyed. Keeping in mind their mainstay customers using Excel at a desktop, Microsoft has created a spacious version that all can benefit from.

Watch the free video here, transcripts for the entire video follow:

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Video transcripts:

Welcome back to our course on Excel 2013.  In this section, I’m going to take a pretty quick look at what’s new in Excel 2013.  If you haven’t used Excel before, what’s new may not mean very much to you, but this is quite a short section and I still think it’s worth you going through this section because it will also highlight some of the features that I’ll be concentrating on as they are new ones.

So first of all, there’s a whole section on what’s new in Office 2013 and within that there’s a section on what’s new in Excel 2013.  There’s a video at the beginning that takes you through the main points.  There are quite a few new features; some of them are really quite small in terms of the overall scale and scope of Excel 2013.  And to be fair, some of them are quite advanced topics which you’d really need to look at our advanced course to be able to see the impact of.  But what I’m going to do here is just go through the main ones that will affect us on this course and I suggest you go through what’s new in Excel 2013 on the Microsoft website, particularly if you’ve used Excel before, and there you can get links to some of the changes in more detail.

Now for existing users, people who have used earlier versions of Excel, one of the most noticeable difference will be the change of the overall look and feel.  We’re going to look at Excel 2013 in the next section and one of the things you’ll notice is that everything seems to be a little bit more open, everything seems to be a little bit less crowded.  And one of the reasons for this is that the whole of Office 2013 now is geared up for use with touch devices and therefore allowing for people with slightly fat fingers, my fingers are probably slightly fat fingers, it gives you a little bit more space to use touch on the screen.  Now that’s not to say the use of touch has taken over, far from it.  But if you’re trying to use a product like Excel with a touch screen, you do need a certain amount of flexibility in terms of being able to touch the screen accurately, particularly as with Excel you may have a very large amount of data on a worksheet.  So if you’re a new user, one of the things you’ll notice is there seems to be a lot more space which in itself I think is not a bad thing anyway.

Another key feature when you first open Excel 2013 is that you’ll see a page where you can start with one of the provided templates.  And with Excel 2013, templates do most of the setup and design work for you.  Now if you’re creating a spreadsheet for a common type of application, there’s a good chance that Excel 2013 will include a template that you can start to work from.  Of course, the use of Excel is so wide now, and the number of applications is so wide, that there can’t possibly be a template for every possible job.  But if you’re doing something straightforward, perhaps like a budget or something like that, the chances are there’ll be something that will get you started at least.

Now the next two or three topics that are new in Excel 2013 are, first of all, Quick Analysis Tool which enables you to do pretty much instant data analysis on a set of data.  And there’s also a Flash Fill facility that lets you fill out an entire column of data in a flash, as it says there.  There is also what I think is really quite a significant new tool, which is a Chart Recommendations Tool.  Now if you’re familiar with Excel, you’ll know that a lot of its strength is in its ability to draw very sophisticated charts.  And there are so many types of chart and they can be customized to such a high level that sometimes it’s difficult to work out which chart is the best one to use in your situation.  Well, Excel 2013 includes a facility now to recommend a chart and this is one of the tools that we will be looking at on this course.  Now to be fair, a lot of the other changes in Excel 2013 also relate to charting and some of them are really quite advanced features to do with pivot tables and charts, slices, and the like.  And although we’ll be able to look at some of those on this course, for many of them you’ll need to look at our advanced course.

Now if you’ve used Excel before, you’ll know that you quite often finish up in a situation where you’re working on two or even more workbooks at the same time.  If that’s the case in Excel 2013, it’s worth noting that each workbook has its own Window.  And that makes it very easy to switch between two when you’re working on two at the same time, perhaps transferring data between them.  But it also makes things a lot easier when you’re using two monitors which, of course, nowadays is an increasingly popular way of working.

I mentioned just now that one of the strengths of Excel is its charting capabilities. Another of its strengths is the calculation facilities provided by the range of Excel functions that are available.  Well, in Excel 2013, there are many new functions related to math, trigonometry, statistics, engineering, lookup references, many, many new functions, and other calculation facilities that we’ll touch on later on in the course.

Now increasingly people are storing data online.  You may well be aware of SkyDrive.  You may already have a free SkyDrive setup.  And your organization, your company may use Office 365.  Well, there are various ways that you can save and share files online in Excel 2013.  You can also do things like embed worksheet data in a webpage.  And there is a new feature using link to share an Excel worksheet in an online meeting, for example.  And we’ll be looking at some of these features of Excel 2013 a little bit later on in the course.

One of the other things you’ll notice on the Microsoft list is saving to a new file format, the new strict open XML spreadsheet file format.  This is an ISO based new format.  And then after that in the Microsoft list what we basically have is a list of many of the new charting features.  Now if you’re new to Excel many of these won’t mean very much to you.  If you’re not new to Excel there are extensions to the capabilities of data labeling. You can view animation in charts.  You’ve also got improvements to pivot tables, slices, and so on.  Now I’m not going to go through all of these charting facilities now, some of these we’re going to come up with later on.  But then once we get to the end of the extensions to the charting facilities, there are also some new what are called Inquire Add-In facilities which help you to analyze and review your workbooks to look for any design issues, any functional issues, any broken links, that kind of thing.  So the list is actually quite a long list.  Many of them are quite small and esoteric features but quite important.  But two or three of them are really very significant.

So I hope you found that quick run through of the new features useful.  And in the next section we’re going to quickly look at what to be aware of if you’re using a touch device.  So please join me for that.

Simon Calder

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!