Microsoft Excel 2. Review Whats New in Excel 2. By Jay Garmon. Microsoft Excel 2. Excel File Locked For Editing Macros' title='Excel File Locked For Editing Macros' />Office 2. We break down whats new in Excel 2. Before I get into whats been added to Microsoft Excel 2. The macro recording errors that plagued Excel 2. In the old version, including shapes or charts in your macro recording would leave the final file with huge function gaps or worse, leave a blank recording altogether. You can now compose graphics inclusive macros without fear of random bugs creeping into your supposed timesavers. Also nearly all of the features I detail below are not included in Excel Starter Edition or the Excel Web App. Mouse Pointer Themes For Windows 7 Free Download more. Both applications are free, and are thus subject to some notable feature limits. Revised Ribbon. As with every other Microsoft Office 2. Excel 2. 01. 0 sports a revised version of the ribbon interface that debuted in Office 2. The glowing orb Office Button from Excel 2. File menu in Excel 2. The ribbon itself is cleaner, leaner and offers more enhanced customization options. Back to Free MS Office Tutorials Press CtrlF to search for a word. Microsoft Excel Glossary. You can even pin common functions to a quick menu that sits above the ribbon. Also, unlike Microsoft Word, the Excel ribbon is in a constant on state, so there are always some controls visible just like in previous Excel versions. While there is no one click process to make Microsoft Excel 2. Excel 2. 00. 3, the transition from the classic Excel menu system to the modern ribbon interface is much less traumatic in Excel 2. Backstage. The return of the File menu to the ribbon doesnt mean a return of the File menu that youre used to. Clicking File in Excel 2. Backstage view, which completely hides your active worksheet in favor of a full screen set of controls. All the options you associated with the old File menu saving options, printing and document templates are present, but with a lot of additional bells and whistles. For example, you can now save your Excel worksheets to Skydrive, Microsofts free online storage service. Skydrive does require a Microsoft Live ID, which means Hotmail and MSN Messenger users are already eligible. This is a great sharing option since you can keep a version of a spreadsheet on an accessible for anywhere Web drive. Backstage also contains the Help menu, a permissions editor and the options menu that lets you customize the ribbon. Collaborative Editing. Microsoft Excel 2. Hi everyone, first time authoring here and looking to pass on one of the neat, but less intuitive aspects of data management in Excel. Often I find myself with data. Excel File Locked For Editing Macros' title='Excel File Locked For Editing Macros' />Shared Workbooks, which allows multiple users to open and edit the same Excel file simultaneously. If your office shares a common sales spreadsheet that many employees need to update, particularly one on a shared network drive collaborative editing means not getting locked out of a file because someone else has it open. Collaborative editing isnt directly supported for documents stored on Skydrive. In those cases, youll have to use the Excel Web App, which has a somewhat less robust functionality, but can handle basic data entry and calculations. Protected View. Microsoft Office macros have been a glaring security problem since dinosaurs roamed the Earth or so it seems, and Protected View is designed to finally close this vulnerability. Any Excel document or Excel readable document with suspicious origins is automatically opened in Protected View, which means its sandboxed with macros and add ins disabled. You cant edit the document until you disable Protected View, but this extra step will let you read a spreadsheet without giving it free reign on your desktop. Any spreadsheet thats downloaded from the Internet or received as an email attachment is automatically shunted to Protected View upon first opening if you enable editing once, the document is considered safe from that point forward and opens normally. Now the sales rep with the virus encrusted laptop cant easily infect your machine by emailing you this months order spreadsheet. Sparklines and Slicers. For those of you who create custom reports and pivot tables in Excel, Sparklines and Slicers are two new Excel 2. Sparklines are miniature graphs that fit inside single worksheet cells. Got a long line of weekly data returns that you want summed up brieflyAdd a sparkline to the end of the row and demonstrate the ebb and flow quickly and easily. These tiny graphs are a handy way to save screen and print out real estate. Excel File Locked For Editing Macros' title='Excel File Locked For Editing Macros' />Pivot tables are the black magic killer feature of Excel, but those precious few data magicians that can code useful pivot tables are often frustrated by the people theyre coding them for. Slicers let you build conditional displays into your pivot tables. For example, you may roll up your monthly revenue into a single total and display using a single chart. Slicers could let you break out or slice your revenue by source, and display the options on an interactive list of buttons within a report. Click on the Online Sales slicer, for example, and the main chart will shift to display revenue solely from online sales. Click the In store Sales slicer button, and the chart will shift to display data from In Store Sales. Its a simple way to make your pivot table reports more interactive and useful, while saving you the trouble of coding multiple charts. Conclusion. Compared to most other Office apps, Microsoft Excel 2. Office 2. 00. 7 incarnation. The improved ribbon is nice, and the integration with Skydrive is rife with possibilities, but neither is a serious game changer. Unless you are a devoted number cruncher with a real need for sparklines, slicers or collaborative editing, theres no compelling reason to upgrade from Excel 2. If youre happy with your current version of Excel, theres no reason to stop using it in favor of Excel 2. Related articles from our sister sites. Excel Templates Free Excel Templates, Excel Downloads, Excel Charts, VBA Macros and More Chandoo.