Unveiling Excel 2007

Unlike those in the new Word, the chapter headings here -- "Home," "Insert," "Page Layout," "Formulas," "Data," "Review," and "View" -- make sense. And with a bit of patience you can poke your way around and find most of the new features without much fuss.

But if you are a stick-in-the-mud and refuse to change, fear not -- many of the traditional functions you already know can be found with a right click or with some customizable buttons that run across the top of the screen.

However, if you give the ribbon a chance, as you should, you will find that most of the once-tricky Excel features are now ludicrously simple. Fonts can be adjusted on the fly with simple-to-see and -use buttons, as can the classic Excel hand-tendon busters: "Wrap Text," "Merge Cells" and "Center."

In fact, "Merge & Center" has its own set of buttons. Don't even try to tell me your tired old fingers aren't yearning for that!

And right away you will notice a significant performance gain.

Besides upping the upper limit of cells on a sheet to a million rows by 16,000 columns -- which really, truly catapults Excel into heavy-iron database territory -- new dual-threaded personal computers have a real application here in the new Excel.

My test machine, a later-model H-P with a dual-threaded 1.99-gigahertz processor, ran as fast as I could push it: Preview functions, charting and imagery all were blazingly fast, as well as fancy calculations such as Monte Carlo simulations and correlation studies.

Number Crunching

But all of this would be meaningless if Excel couldn't mash up the data. Apart from some usual Microsoft issues with compatibility, Excel 2007 can rock the numeric house.

Right off the bat, you should get to know the new "Data" tab. It allows you to access information from almost any source: Microsoft Access files, text files, databases, the works.

I clicked on the "Web" button, surfed over to EDGAR to get some 10-Qs -- in this case, the recent income statements, statement of cash flows, and balance sheets for Microsoft. And I imported them into three Excel sheets in just a few clicks.

One word of caution: This all sounds fab. And it is. But you are still at the mercy of your inputs.