With each new release of Microsoft Excel, there are always a few new features that can make you more productive when working with spreadsheets. In this blog post, we’ll take a look at some of the top new features in Excel 2016. Whether you’re just starting to use Excel or you’re a long-time user, these features may be worth trying out!
1. Get and Transform Data
Do you ever find yourself manually copying and pasting data into a worksheet? Wouldn’t it be great if you could bring all of your company’s data into one place for easy analysis, reporting, and sharing with other people? With the Get & Transform option, this is possible. You can connect to many different types of databases (including Oracle, Teradata, and Netezza) as well as files (such as .csv), folders or even personal OneDrive accounts. There are options to help you refine the data that you want before bringing it into Excel. Plus, Power Query allows you to advance your dataset quickly by “mashing up” multiple sets of data from various sources — making pivot tables much more powerful than when you just have one spreadsheet.
2. Collaboration Tools in Excel Online
Another great collaboration tool in Excel 2016 is the ability to share your file with others without having to send them a copy of the software. Also, unlike previous versions of Microsoft Office, there’s no requirement for co-authors to have an Office 365 subscription to view and work on files that are stored online — it can be done through Excel Online with free capability. This makes it easier than ever before for people who are not familiar with the desktop version of Excel to easily work on spreadsheets that are shared with them. You can also get this with the help of A1office mobile application XLSX viewer and editorÂ
3. Insights in Excel Mobile
When working on mobile devices such as tablets or phones, it may be to make use of cloud services for data analysis. However, with these devices, you want to be able to access your spreadsheets wherever you are — not just when you’re at home or in the office and connected to the internet. With Excel Mobile on Windows 10 devices, insights help deliver a more personalized experience based on suggestions made by the software itself as well as location services such as GPS. This provides a better user experience regardless of whether your spreadsheet is stored online or offline on your device.
4. New Charts & Visualization Tools
Excel 2016 has many new features that provide enhanced tools for creating impressive charts and graphs. There’s an option called “insights” which helps you visualize your data in new ways as it draws from information within the spreadsheet as well as external data sources. You can also highlight and annotate them so that you can easily share the visualization with others without having to print out hard copies of your spreadsheet.
5. New Design Themes
Excel 2016 has a variety of new design themes that provide an improved user experience when creating spreadsheets. Also, many users will be happy to know that there’s no longer a dependency on Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) — making it easier than ever to customize their workbooks by using keyboard shortcuts and other advanced features such as pivot tables and auto filters.
6. Grammar Tools for Lists
As part of the collaboration tools in Excel Online mentioned above, there are grammar tools for lists. This feature automatically formats items in each list based on the rules you set up. For example, if your items were always supposed to be formatted as either bullet points or numbers (with the appropriate indents), this feature would apply that formatting automatically so that you don’t have to spend time justifying, bulleting, and numbering each item in your lists.
7. New Commands & Functions
Excel’s command buttons are now located at the top of the Ribbon — so instead of having to look for them under “Insert” or clicking through several levels of menus, everything is presented clearly on one screen. There are other improvements such as new commands and functions that enable users to work more fluidly with tables, text, and data. With these tools, creating complex formulas isn’t as challenging as it used to be.
8. Connected Apps & OpenAPI Providers
In Excel 2016, developers can now take advantage of the open-application programming interface (OpenAPI). This enables third-party apps and services to connect with Excel so that you can automate tasks such as importing data from a web service or saving information to cloud storage. This provides a better user experience and makes creating, modifying, and sharing spreadsheets faster and more efficient than before.
9. Helpful Add-Ins for Businesses
Excel 2016 also offers add-ins that can help businesses save time and improve productivity. For example, Power Query enables you to import data from external sources such as web services or databases. It also enables you to save the queries so that they can be shared with other users and linked back to a worksheet. This feature is also available in Excel Online.
10. Improved Interaction Another way that Excel 2016 makes it easier for users to customize their spreadsheet is by enabling them to import specific views from other workbooks. This saves time and enables you to focus on the task at hand. All users need to do is select the workbook they want and choose which sheet/view they want to copy and paste into their spreadsheet.
