While most of the changes in Excel 2008 are meant to make life easier for beginners, advanced users with a ton of numbers to crunch get a little something, too.

 

Excel 2008

Excel 2008 now supports sheets with more than a million rows and 16,000 columns each. Should be plenty for your fantasy baseball league stats.

 

Unless you’re a math geek, creating and editing spreadsheets can be one of the most intimidating tasks in your job description. The more your software can simplify the job of crunching all those numbers, the happier you’re likely to be. Excel 2008 includes some genuinely helpful new features to turn business math into clear, communicative spreadsheets.

 

Elements Gallery

Instant access to Excel’s templates.

 

Throughout Office 2008, Microsoft has added a new element: the Elements Gallery, so named because it acts as a single access point for various document elements, gives you a quick way to find, view, and change various components of your documents. In Excel, that means managing sheet styles, inserting and changing different kinds of charts, adding artsy graphics, and working with snazzy WordArt.

 

The Elements Gallery speeds up just about every task in Excel, short of mundane data entry. Want to create a budget sheet? Click Sheets, choose Budgets, and select one of the templates. Need to add a chart to your quarterly report? Choose Charts from the Element Bar and you can choose from bar, bubble, donut, pie, and other tasty options. Try one and see if it works for you. If it doesn’t, simply keep the active chart highlighted and select a new chart type from the Elements Gallery to transform it instantly.

 

Magic Formulas

Now you don’t need to be a math major to figure out a formula to use.

 

Setting up math and other functions has always been one of the most daunting aspects of working with spreadsheets. In the new Excel, this otherwise opaque process gets a complete overhaul in the Excel Toolbox. Now you can type in the kind of function you want to perform, such as “subtract,” and Excel will show you a list of formula functions that can do that. Double-click your choice, and select the fields you want to work with. Color-coded selection boxes make it easier to keep track of what you’re doing.

 

Our Verdict

Excel has never been our favorite Office app. But since we can’t avoid using spreadsheets we’ve trudged through it for years. That said, we’ve never had as much fun crunching numbers as we’ve had with Excel 2008.

 

A intuitive retooling of the functions editor in the toolbar makes it easier than ever to manipulate data in your sheets. Whether you’re concatenating the names of your employees or running sales averages for a presentation, the new Excel is the hands-down top choice for getting the job done.

 

Not only does Excel’s new Elements Gallery take the drudgery out of charting, adding graphics, and selecting templates for your sheets, but it actually makes you work faster. We’re pretty sure Excel would’ve remained the leading spreadsheet program anyway, but the new enhancements outpace every competing app on the market.