Microsoft Office

Part I
Getting Started with Excel
Other elements that comprise the new look include
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Six new modern-looking fonts: The default workbook font is now 11-point Calibri, which,
I think, is much more readable than the old 10-point Arial, especially in smaller sizes.
Quick Access Toolbar: A personal toolbar, to which you can add commands that you use regularly.
This toolbar is the only part of the Excel 2007 interface that the user can customize.
The Mini toolbar: A new addition to the right-click menu. This toolbar contains commonly-used
formatting icons, displayed near your mouse pointer for quick access.
Larger Worksheets
Over the years, perhaps the most common complaint about Excel was the size of a worksheet. Users who
required more rows or columns were simply out of luck. Microsoft finally responded, and Excel 2007 has
upped the ante significantly. A worksheet now has 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns, which works out
to more than 17 billion cells — almost three cells for every man, woman, and child on the planet. Stated
differently, an Excel 2007 worksheet has more than 1,000 times as many cells as an Excel 2003 worksheet.
Having more rows and columns doesn’t mean that you can actually use them all. If you
attempted to fill up all cells in a worksheet, you would soon run out of memory. The advantage
to having more rows and columns is the flexibility it provides.
NOTE
In addition to a larger worksheet grid, Excel 2007 has also increased some other limits that have frustrated
users. Table 2.1 summarizes some of these changes.
TABLE 2.1
By the Numbers: Excel 2003 versus Excel 2007
Excel 2003 Excel 2007
Number of rows 65,536 1,048,576
Number of columns 256 16,384
Amount of memory used 1 Gbytes Maximum allowed by Windows
Number of colors 56 4.3 billion
Number of conditional formats per cell 3 Unlimited
Number of levels of sorting 3 64
Number of levels of undo 16 100
Number of items shown in the Auto-Filter dropdown 1,000 10,000
The total number of characters that can display in a cell 1,000 32,000
Number of unique styles in a workbook 4,000 64,000
Maximum number of characters in a formula 1,000 8,000
Number of levels of nesting in a formula 7 64
Maximum number of function arguments 30 255
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