Microsoft Press First Look 2007 Microsoft Office System

More Room, More Speed, More Choices
Chapter 5: Extend Your Insight with Office Excel 2007 63
Some of the changes in Office Excel 2007 will be most important for power users who create,
update, modify, and report on mega worksheets that demand the utmost in processing power
and speed. Here’s an overview of some of the changes that affect the way Office Excel 2007
manages and supports large, complex worksheets.
If you were maxxing out the row and column limits of Office Excel 2003, you’ll be glad to
know that the Office Excel 2007 worksheet has been greatly enlarged. According to David
Gainer, Group Program Manager for Microsoft Office Excel, “Specifically, the Excel 12 grid
will be 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns. That’s 1,500 percent more rows and 6,30 percent
more columns than in Excel 2003, and for those of you that are curious, columns now end at
XFD instead of IV.” 1
And even on huge, formula-intensive worksheets you will experience faster calculations
because Office Excel 2007 now supports dual processors and multithreaded chipsets, which
enable Office Excel 2007 to take full advantage of your system’s processing power and dramatically
reduce your wait time. Another speed booster: The memory management in Office
Excel 2007 has been increased from 1 GB to 2 GB, giving you more room to work with
complex, sophisticated spreadsheets that previously maxxed out your system resources.
Additionally, Office Excel 2007 moves the bar on some of the limits in the earlier version; for
example, now you can set unlimited formatting in the same workbook (this used to be capped
at 4,000 format types). The color palette of Office Excel 2007 has grown to support the full
16 million colors, and now you can create as many cell references to a single cell as your
computer’s memory will allow (this used to be limited to 8,000 references per cell).
Create Better Spreadsheets, Faster
Most professionally created worksheets today—if they are shared with an audience out of
house—include a least a little bit of design. The titles are formatted to stand out; rules or shading
might be used to call attention to special areas of interest. Worksheets, when they are
included in financial reports, business plans, or presentations, often are given the same look
and feel as the surrounding material, so the font, color, and arrangement of the information
becomes important.
Office Excel 2007 makes it easier to create better looking documents by providing a number
of easy-to-apply formatting options. And if you’re working in Page Layout view, you can see
how those design changes look when you print them.
1. For more information about the changes in Office Excel 2007, see David Gainer’s blog at blogs.msdn.com/excel
/archive/2005/09/23/473185.aspx.