Quick detour – cool things on the status bar and great-looking charts
Today I decided to take a quick break from Excel Services to
- talk about a few small but useful changes that have been made to the status bar and
- show off a few charts
First, the status bar
Zoom control - we have added a slider that allows the user to adjust the “zoom” of the document without needing to pop up any windows. When you slide the control, the document resizes as you slide, so you can adjust to just the “zoom” you want before you let go of the slider. You can also click on the + and – buttons to increment or decrement “zoom” by 10% per click. Finally, for those of you that like using the zoom dialog, you can just click on the 100% (which is a button) and it will launch the Zoom dialog.
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Multiple status bar calculations – In previous versions of Excel, when you selected numerical data, you could see a summary of that data in the status bar – sum, count, average, etc. You could choose from 6 different summaries, but you could only see one at a time. That seemed unnecessarily limiting, so in Excel 12 we let you put any or all of them on the status bar, so you can see sum, min, max, numerical count, count, and average all at once if you like, or any combination of the six.
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You specify the items you would like to see by right-clicking on the status bar.
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View switcher – In the tradition of Microsoft Word and Microsoft PowerPoint, we have added a set of buttons to the status bar that allow you to switch between views. One is for normal view, one is for page break preview, and the third is for a great new view we have added to Excel 12 – page layout view. Much more on page layout view when I cover the formatting, printing, and layout improvements we have made in Excel 12 (probably early next year at current speed).
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Insert worksheet button – ok, this isn’t on the status bar, but it is close, so I am including it in this post. You may have noticed in previous posts that there was an additional small button after the tabs in the spreadsheets I have been showing off. When clicked, this button adds a worksheet. The point is simply to make it quicker to add worksheets to your workbooks.
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And now for some screenshots of charts …
We have done a lot of great work in charting this release (see the overview post for a bit of a description). I am going to cover this work in detail sometime around the new year, but to give everyone an idea of what is coming, I thought I would post a few screenshots of charts I made yesterday afternoon. This should give everyone an idea as to the vastly improved charting that is coming with Office 12. The most obvious thing you will notice is the range of new graphic effects, like transparency, lighting effects, shadows, reflections, etc. Besides being much better looking with a greater range of graphic effects, we have also done a lot to make it a snap to create a very wide variety of different, professional-looking charts. Each of the charts below were created with no more than 2-3 clicks total, so the whole thing took a matter of minutes. Enjoy.
(Note, there is more than one chart on each screenshot, so I encourage you to click on the images below and take a look.)
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Next week, back to Excel Web Services and more about running spreadsheets on the server.
