Microsoft Excel 2007's Parts and Functions

Microsoft Excel 2007 gives users state-of-the-art tools for creating, managing and presenting data. But Excel's developers have made those tools easier to get to, compared to prior versions.

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A key graphical interface feature of Excel 2007 is the Ribbon, which is a toolbar that contains icons for the most common commands. Think of the Ribbon, which is new to Excel 2007, as a Turbo Toolbar: it speeds your workflow by enabling easy navigation to the tools you need. Unlike the old style menus, which you have to open each time you want to use a tool, the Ribbon's toolbars stay exploded open.

Watch the Ribbon in action: create a small table of data in a worksheet, then select the Insert menu tab. The Ribbon changes completely, filling its width with an array of objects that you can insert into a worksheet.

Click the Column icon to create a column chart. The drop-down menu displaying the sub-styles of Column charts is completely graphical, making short work of finding the style you need.

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Choose any sub-style in the Column style. Notice that Excel refills the Ribbon with new tools -- the ones you'll now need to work with an existing chart. As before, these tools remain visible so you don't have to dig for them in a collapsing drop-down menu.

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Notice that creating the chart has created an extra menu title, Chart Tools. If you navigate to another tab, you can quickly get back to the chart functions by single-clicking this Chart Tools heading.

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Learn more about Excel's Ribbon from the following two articles:

Customizing and Adding Buttons to the Excel 2007 Ribbon

What is the Microsoft Office 2007 Ribbon?

The Home menu contains all the most commonly used functions and tools in Excel 2007. The copy and paste, text and number alignment, AutoSum, and find/replace tools are here – but notice that they have their own groups or panes: the Clipboard command group holds the clipboard tools, the Font group holds the font tools and functions, and so on, through the Editing group. The logical and graphical grouping of similar tools isn’t new to MS Office or Excel 2007, but the clarity of their icons is.

Keep in mind that the command groups display the most commonly used tools by default, but you still have quick access to the less commonly used tools and functions: on the Font group, click the small arrow, (called the Dialog Box Launcher) in the lower right hand corner. A dialog box appears to present more tools for managing fonts.

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The clipboard viewer

The Home tab's Clipboard Viewer is a step up from the usual copy and paste tools. Clipboard Viewer lets you paste any of 24 clipboard items that you previously copied to the clipboard. Click on the Clipboard group's dialog launcher to open the Clipboard Viewer. If you leave open the Clipboard Viewer and copy several worksheet cells to the clipboard, the clipboard viewer dynamically updates with each copy, displaying the source and content of the copied item -- including graphics, if you copied a chart.

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Selecting the Insert tab fills the width of the Excel 2007 Ribbon with icons whose tools and functions insert objects into worksheets.

One type of object is called SmartArt, which is new to Excel 2007. SmartArt is like an evolved version of the Shapes you can illustrate Word and Excel documents with. Use the SmartArt Picture Caption List, for example, as a storyboard to depict a narration.

The command groups Tables, Illustrations, Charts, Links, and Text hold other objects you an insert in worksheets.

With the Pivot Tables (in the Tables command group) you can quickly arrange lists and tables. Try out Pivot Tables with the following example.

In a worksheet, enter the data shown in the table at left in this graphic:

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Select the table and then choose Pivot Table>Pivot Table on the Insert tab's Table command group. In the Create Pivot Table dialog box, leave all options as they first appear, except for Existing worksheet. Choose that option, then select any blank cell in the worksheet. In the Pivot Table Field List that appears, select the Room and Total Tips checkboxes. The Pivot Table is created, displaying how many tips were collected, by serving room. You can easily reconfigure this table to display other data, by clicking the pivot table and changing which of the table's fields are checked. Learn more about using Pivot Tables here:

Making and Using Pivot Tables in Excel