Geoff's 10 Commandments of Excel

1. Excel is NOT a database program; don't try to make it into one
2. The formula bar NEVER lies
3. Let Excel do the heavy lifting
4. There's a function for that
5. If you have a list, then you should have a table
6. Scroll down when possible, scroll across only when necessary
7. Separate data, analysis, and presentation
8. Macros are the nuclear option – compiled code is more effective than interpreted code
9. Excel help SUCKS
10. I may be wrong about all of this…you need to find out for yourself

Office 2011- WOW!

I was pretty underwhelmed by the release of Office 2008. Then again, to be fair, the minute I heard macros were gone, the rest of it was just "blah, blah, blah."

By the way, I did give it a chance. I wasn't impressed. The Document Elements feature in Word was kind of cool, but I knew how to do all that before. The multiple masters in PowerPoint is a nice idea, but I'd rather just have different color schemes with the same theme, and call it good. The fact that it runs natively on an Intel processor is handy, and having over 1,000,000,00 rows and 16,000 columns in Excel is helpful.

But I would have gladly given up all of those things to have macros back. That's just too critical to my business needs to give up.

With Office 2011, I don't have to. With Office 2011, I get all of the features of Office 2008, plus much, much more.

A few highlights:

• PowerPoint has two new main features:
  
  
• One is something that Keynote has had for years, but is nice to see here - the ability to create sections. If I have a long presentation, having it broken into sections makes it easier to manage.
• The second is the ability to visually re-arrange the stacking order of objects in a slide. It looks like Cover Flow in iTunes or Finder. It's handy if you have a slide with a lot of drawing objects.

• Word only has a new feature or two:
  
  
• All of the applications have more templates available, but Word really benefits from it the most - calendars, brochures, booklets, you name it.
• Word now has a view called Publishing Layout, which makes your page look like it's on a drafting table. This is useful if you're using Word in a desktop publishing capacity - place and arrange text boxes, pictures, and other graphic elements.

• The artist formerly known as Entourage is now Outlook, and that means a few significant changes:
  
  
• If you're trying to import a PST file from Outlook for windows, you now can. Before, you couldn't. Now, you can.
• No longer are you at the mercy of the dreaded Database! Instead of all of your messages/data being stored in a single file, you now have individual messages stored as individual messages. The folder is ~/Documents/Microsoft User Data/Office 2011 Identities/Main Identity/Data Records

• What about Excel?! Thought you'd never ask. So much new, so much improved, so truly wondrous to behold. I'll start with some of the improvements:
  
  
• Macros are back, baby! Not only will all of your old macros from Office 2004 work, you now have Auto-Complete, like our colleagues on Windows do.
• Conditional Formatting has infinitely more options; you can have stoplights, color bars, shades of color, and a host of other options. No more red, yellow, green!
• The Home tab, which contains some common formatting commands, has gotten smarter; merging cells and aligning text is faster and easier.
• Plotting charts, including placement of legends and labels, is more efficient.
• You can filter and sort up to 64 levels, including font and background colors. Date filtering is MUCH more efficient - dates are grouped by year, then month, then day.
  

• Now for some of the new features:
  
  
• More functions - in particular, NETWORKDAYS.INTL, which is NETWORKDAYS but allows you to pick what days constitute weekends, instead of just defaulting to Saturday and Sunday.
• Instead of the half-baked List Manager, you now have Tables - alternating row colors, auto-populate formulas, and, best of all, you can base a PivotTable on the table, which is a dynamically growing/shrinking range, instead of a range of cells you have to manage yourself.
• Sparkline charts - instead of your traditional line chart, the Sparkline is a chart that "lives" inside the cell, to provide a mini-summary of your data.
• The Data tab has your usual suspects - Sort, Filter, and PivotTable. And then there was "Remove Duplicates." This is one of those buttons that makes you think there really is a Santa Claus.

Bottom line? Don't walk - RUN to the store, and pick this up. It's AMAZING. Until next time, be well.