What’s New in Microsoft Excel 2013?
If you haven’t used Excel 2013 before, let’s take a quick look at the new features and improvements. Some of them are small and may rarely be used. Others, though, are very advanced and require expert knowledge. Knowing the main features will help you understand better how to work in this new software.
What’s New in Excel 2013?
Here’s an important tip—
To dive into the details of all the changes, you can visit the Microsoft website. There you’ll find a long list of upgrades and features along with a detailed description of each. This is an overview of the main ones.
The biggest change you’ll notice in Excel 2013 is that it is now compatible with touch devices as well as the entire Office 2013 suite of products. For touch devices, there are enlarged spaces between commands and icons. Running Excel 2013 on touch screens is even easy for people with large fingers.
Another key feature is the changed start up page. When you first open Excel 2013, provided templates will display which are useful for design work or other jobs using Excel 2013 or its spreadsheets.
Other newly added items include the Quick Analysis Tool, which enables you to do instant data analysis on a set of data, the Flash Fill option that lets you automatically populate large volumes of data without manual entry, and the Chart Recommendations Tool.
Excel 2013 also includes an option to recommend a chart. For example, now you can view animation in charts. A lot of the other changes in Excel 2013 also relate to working with pivot tables or slices. Moreover, there are many new functions related to math, trigonometry, statistics, engineering and lookup references. To use them, you need to have some knowledge in those fields of science. That is why we will consider these changes as advanced user features.
If you’ve used Excel before, you’ll know that working on two or more workbooks at the same time is a common situation, and there were not many options for that. In Excel 2013, every workbook has its own dedicated window, making it easy to switch between them.
Nowadays it is popular to share information online and there are many online services for that. If you need to store data online, there are various ways you can save and share files online in Excel 2013, such as with the SkyDrive, embedding worksheet data in a webpage, and sharing your worksheets with colleagues during meetings over the web.
Another new feature is that the Microsoft list now saves to a new ISO based file format – strict open XML spreadsheet file.
This new feature called Inquire Add-In facilities helps you check your workbooks for any design or functional issues or broken links.
As was mentioned at the beginning of the article, a detailed list of changes for Excel 2013 are available at the Microsoft website.
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!
