Do you have a manager whos eyes glaze over when presented with a column of numbers? Excel 2007 offers some new amazing data visualizations. Episode 653 shows you how.
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel 97-2007 from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 377 tips from the book!
This blog is the video podcast companion to the book, Learn Excel 97-2007 from MrExcel. Download a new two minute video every workday to learn one of the 377 tips from the book!
Transcript of the video:
Welcome back to the MrExcel netcast.
I'm Bill Jelen.
This week, we're taking a look at Excel 2007.
Some of the cool new features in Excel 2007.
Do you have a manager whose eyes just glaze over, when you show them a column of numbers?
I mean, I see this all the time.
They've added some great new data visualization.
So, I have here a simple report that shows revenue by customer.
If I go in and choose data bars and then choose a specific color.
Let's choose that blue there.
What happens is Excel takes the numbers.
Numbers that are largest, get the largest swath of blue.
The numbers that are the smallest, get the smallest swath of blue.
So, instantly the managers eyes are drawn to the high-flyers within that list.
Other items within visualizations is something called a color scale.
With a color scale, we can set up a three color scale from green to red.
Largest numbers in green, smallest numbers in red or they have four different schemes here.
Largest numbers in red, smallest numbers in green or blue to red, large in blue or red to blue.
Depending how you want to do it or you can build your own color scheme.
You can use any of the 16 million colors in Excel and create those on the last bit of visualization.
They have something called an icon set.
Over here on the right-hand side.
You'll see that we have several different icon schemes, including like the traffic light, the Green, Yellow and Red.
Largest numbers in green, smallest numbers in red.
But they've also added a whole bunch of other ones.
You know, the arrows or my favorite the cell phone power bars.
You know, who doesn't understand the cell phone power bar concept today.
So, basically now the largest numbers get the largest number of bars or the smallest numbers got the smallest number of bars.
This is great.
I've seen this all the time for key performance indicators.
We want to highlight the high-flyers in green or something like that, or you can now do that very easily with conditional formatting.
You'll also notice that as I browse around here through the list.
The selected area is actually updating automatically, so this is called live preview.
It's another feature in Excel 2007, many times you can just hover, hover, hover.
When you finally find one that looks good.
Choose that and it will apply it.
So, you don't have to choose something and then go back to something.
I meant go back to something, go back you can just hover over it in the Menu and it'll show at a live preview of exactly what's going to look like.
Some great new features in Excel 2007.
I know that many companies.
I'm hearing a lot of the fortune 30 or switching over.
January first, February first, March first and so...
Even if your company's not going to upgrade.
You still have the issue that maybe your vendor or your customer are going to start sending files that are from Excel 2007.
So be aware of that if you're in Excel 2002 or 2003.
There's a free converter that will let you open these files and even save these files, provided they don't go pastor of 65536.
But if you're an older version of Excel, it's time to start thinking about you might need upgrade just, so that way you can get these files from your vendors your customers and be able to open.
Hey! Thanks for stopping by, we'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
I'm Bill Jelen.
This week, we're taking a look at Excel 2007.
Some of the cool new features in Excel 2007.
Do you have a manager whose eyes just glaze over, when you show them a column of numbers?
I mean, I see this all the time.
They've added some great new data visualization.
So, I have here a simple report that shows revenue by customer.
If I go in and choose data bars and then choose a specific color.
Let's choose that blue there.
What happens is Excel takes the numbers.
Numbers that are largest, get the largest swath of blue.
The numbers that are the smallest, get the smallest swath of blue.
So, instantly the managers eyes are drawn to the high-flyers within that list.
Other items within visualizations is something called a color scale.
With a color scale, we can set up a three color scale from green to red.
Largest numbers in green, smallest numbers in red or they have four different schemes here.
Largest numbers in red, smallest numbers in green or blue to red, large in blue or red to blue.
Depending how you want to do it or you can build your own color scheme.
You can use any of the 16 million colors in Excel and create those on the last bit of visualization.
They have something called an icon set.
Over here on the right-hand side.
You'll see that we have several different icon schemes, including like the traffic light, the Green, Yellow and Red.
Largest numbers in green, smallest numbers in red.
But they've also added a whole bunch of other ones.
You know, the arrows or my favorite the cell phone power bars.
You know, who doesn't understand the cell phone power bar concept today.
So, basically now the largest numbers get the largest number of bars or the smallest numbers got the smallest number of bars.
This is great.
I've seen this all the time for key performance indicators.
We want to highlight the high-flyers in green or something like that, or you can now do that very easily with conditional formatting.
You'll also notice that as I browse around here through the list.
The selected area is actually updating automatically, so this is called live preview.
It's another feature in Excel 2007, many times you can just hover, hover, hover.
When you finally find one that looks good.
Choose that and it will apply it.
So, you don't have to choose something and then go back to something.
I meant go back to something, go back you can just hover over it in the Menu and it'll show at a live preview of exactly what's going to look like.
Some great new features in Excel 2007.
I know that many companies.
I'm hearing a lot of the fortune 30 or switching over.
January first, February first, March first and so...
Even if your company's not going to upgrade.
You still have the issue that maybe your vendor or your customer are going to start sending files that are from Excel 2007.
So be aware of that if you're in Excel 2002 or 2003.
There's a free converter that will let you open these files and even save these files, provided they don't go pastor of 65536.
But if you're an older version of Excel, it's time to start thinking about you might need upgrade just, so that way you can get these files from your vendors your customers and be able to open.
Hey! Thanks for stopping by, we'll see you next time for another netcast from MrExcel.
