Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Chapter 12. Basic Excel

The best ad Microsoft ever ran for Excel went like this: “99% of spreadsheet users use Microsoft Excel. What are we doing wrong?” It was good because it was true; Excel is the biggest thing going when it comes to hardcore business programs. But Microsoft still seems determined to keep finding ways to make it better, stirring the hearts of accountants, statisticians, and list makers the world over.

Like the rest of its Office brethren, Excel 2008 includes a bunch of new, helpful tools: Ledger sheets are an assortment of preformatted worksheets designed to perform common tasks such as balancing a checkbook, tracking an investment portfolio, or creating an expense report. The new Formula Builder walks you through the steps needed to create these sometimes-daunting equations. If you’re already an old hand with formulas, Formula AutoComplete assists you whenever you start typing a formula in the Formula Bar. Charts in Excel 2008 have also been vastly improved, with new templates and tools to provide effects like 3-D, transparency, and shadows. The Chart tab of the Elements Gallery provides easy access for previewing and inserting any of the dozens of Excel chart styles. Finally, Microsoft keeps doing its part to fuel sales of large monitors: Mac fans can now create spreadsheets with more than 16,000 columns and one million rows—achieving spreadsheet-cell parity with their PC-using counterparts.