Microsoft Office

What’s New in Excel 2007? 2
Collaboration Features
Excel Services is new server technology that ships with Office 12. It’s part of the Microsoft Office Share
Point Server product. Excel Services supports loading, calculating, and rendering Excel spreadsheets on
servers.
If your company is set up with Excel Services, you can use Excel 2007 to collaborate with your coworkers
efficiently and present data to those who don’t use Excel.
NOTE
Using the new Excel Services-based collaboration features is very specific to your organization.
Consequently, these features are not covered in this book.
Compatibility Checker
Given all the new features in Excel 2007, you may be hesitant to share a workbook with others who use an
earlier version of Excel. To find out how your workbook will function with previous versions, use the compatibility
checker. Choose Office ➪ Prepare ➪ Run Compatibility Checker. Figure 2.7 shows an example.
FIGURE 2.7
Use the Compatibility Checker if you plan to share your workbooks with people who use an earlier version of Excel.
Improved Pivot Tables
Excel’s pivot table feature is probably one of its most underutilized features. A pivot table can turn a large
range of raw data into a useful interactive summary table with only a few mouse clicks. Microsoft hopes to
make this feature more accessible by improving just about every aspect of pivot tables in Excel 2007.
One other thing worth noting: Charts created from pivot tables (pivot charts) now retain their formatting
when they’re updated. This loss of formatting had been a frustration for hundreds of thousands of users,
and Microsoft finally did something about it.
CROSS-REF
See Chapters 34 and 35 for more information about pivot tables.
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