Microsoft Excel 2013 is the last of our 4-part series in what’s new and cool with Office 2013. Excel is one of my favorites that I heavily use and depend on. When I saw some of the enhancements they made with this version, I really wished they had them years ago when I was building charts for hours a day. I’ll be showing you how they’ve automated some rather tedious tasks. I’ve got both a video and I’m itemizing below what I’ll be highlighting today.
Intro to Excel 2013 Video for you
Excel 2013
Backstage view –
- There are new templates you’ll see when first starting Excel
- We’ll take some time and go through the new features highlighted in the ‘Let’s Get Started’ tour
- Default will be to save your documents to your SkyDrive. You can override this by going to File>Save>Options
- Sharing documents right from the ‘File’ menu. Options to send via email, pdf, send a link or send an email invite with a link inside the email
Flash Fill Feature
- If you have rows of data that need to be broken out – perhaps you have a cell with a first and last name in it and the names need to be separated into one cell for the first name and a separate cell for the last name. Now Excel will handle this for you easily. This is similar to the Auto Fill feature. An example of this would be when you’re typing days of the week or months. Excel will figure out what you’re trying to do and ask if you want to have it filled in for you. Nice. We won’t go over auto fill in the video, so here are instructions on using this feature.
- Charting – with Excel 2013, you can now highlight a block of your data and look for the Quick Analysis tool to pop up at the lower right of your data. Click to run through options to make your data come alive and highlight the purpose of the data.
- The Flash Fill feature is helpful and a timesaver when you have data grouped together in one cell that needs to be split out. Excel says this works best when the program can find a pattern. If it can’t, then you can always use the text to columns feature, which is also pretty cool, but not new.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this video series. It’s been helpful to me to go over the new features. What new features have you found? Do you think you’ll upgrade to Office 2013 or are you content with the version of Office you’re on? Is there a cool feature you’ve found that you’d like to share? Please leave a comment.