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Quick Reaction to Excel 2013

July 17, 2012 - by

I was recently asked for my opinion of the "modern" Excel 2013. Appearance aside, I see two thrusts in this release:

  1. For the complete Excel rookie, the data lens and flash fill, plus "suggested" pivot tables and charts.
  2. For the Excel guru, they’ve made PowerPivot native, added PowerView, plus a nice Timeline slicer for pivot tables, 69 new formula functions, including some that will retrieve data from a web service. The IsFormula and FormulaText functions will make conditional formatting of formulas easy now.

The Excel Apps concept will make everyone in between happy. I am happy with the release – I am trying to think through a 9 minute summary video to post on YouTube and I am not sure I can get everything in.

The appearance? I don’t like it. But I can work in Excel with my eyes closed. I can live with any "modern" look they throw at me. The new look will make it easier to "touch" Excel on the forthcoming tablet, so I can live with it.