Web Analytics India

- contributed by Deep Moni Hazarika

Most of us had well adapted ourselves to the excel 2003 interface and were able to find the required menu options and controls when needed. And when most of us got pretty comfortable with Excel 2003, Microsoft introduced us to the newer baby of spreadsheets – Excel 2007. Fantastic. Learning doesn’t end there. We are now forced to learn the new interface, figure out where the “File”, “Edit” and those options under the earlier menu and toolbar structure has gone and also understand and memorize this new tab structure. There started another round of talks, likes and dislikes. Well, the window makers expected that, I guess. That’s why they didn’t mind, completely changing the menu structure and introducing the ribbon concept, the very first thing that would surprise first time users of Excel 2007. Excel 2007 looked different and attractive, saved the file in a newer file format, as with other office applications and above all, needed schooling of its new ways.

Questions floated around everywhere – Yahoo Answers, Excel Expert blogs and of course Microsoft provided answers to those in their knowledge base, online and offline as well.

Then – MS Excel 2003

Now – MS Excel 2007

They have drawn a radical uplift at looking at the spreadsheet and also other much used office tools. And then slowly we realized that this new concept actually saved time in our usual work. Well yes, initial few struggling days can’t be ruled out. But Microsoft had help documents, guides and FAQs ready for any kind of questions, considering an average user migrating from Excel 2003 to Excel 2007. If you are not able to find a command or feature, probably you are not looking at the right place.
If you are still wondering as to where the familiar menus and toolbars have been mapped onto the present Excel 2007 download the Excel Ribbon mapping workbook.

There is also an interactive reference guide available for the confused ones that is pretty much helpful.

Preview of the interactive reference guide

If you need a sample report on any of these dashboard tricks, please leave your email id in a comment. And we will mail it over to you.