Chapter 1
The Excel 2010 User Experience
In This Chapter
The Excel 2010 user interface, like Excel 2007, scraps its reliance on a series of pull-down menus, task panes, and multitudinous toolbars. Instead, it uses a single strip at the top of the worksheet called the Ribbon that puts the bulk of the Excel commands you use at your fingertips at all times.
Add to the Ribbon a File tab and a Quick Access toolbar â along with a few remaining task panes (Clipboard, Clip Art, and Research) â and you end up with the handiest way to crunch your numbers, produce and print polished financial reports, as well as organize and chart your data. In other words, to do all the wonderful things for which you rely on Excel.
Best of all, this new and improved Excel user interface includes all sorts of graphical improvements. Foremost is Live Preview that shows you how your actual worksheet data would appear in a particular font, table formatting, and so on before you actually select it. Additionally, Excel 2010 supports an honest to goodness Page Layout View that displays rulers and margins along with headers and footers for every worksheet and has a zoom slider at the bottom of the screen that enables you to zoom in and out on the spreadsheet data instantly. Finally, Excel 2010 is full of pop-up galleries that make spreadsheet formatting and charting a real breeze, especially in tandem with Live Preview.
Excelâs Ribbon User Interface
When you launch Excel 2010, the program opens the first of three new worksheets (named Sheet1) in a new workbook file (named Book1) inside a program window like the one shown in Figure 1-1.
Figure 1-1: The Excel 2010 program window that appears immediately after launching the program.
The Excel program window containing this worksheet of the workbook contains the following components:
Going Backstage via File
To the immediate left of the Home tab on the Ribbon right below the Quick Access toolbar, you find the File tab.
When you click File, the new Backstage View opens. This view contains a menu similar to the one shown in Figure 1-2. When you open the Backstage View, the Info option displays at-a-glance stats about the Excel workbook file you have opened and active in the program.
This information panel is divided into two panes. The pane on the left contains large buttons that enable you to modify the workbookâs permissions, distribution, and versions. The pane on the right contains a thumbnail of the workbook followed by a list of fields detailing the workbookâs various Document Properties, some of which you can change (such as Title, Tags, Categories, and Author), and many of which you canât (such as Size, Last Modified, Created, and so forth).
Above the Info option, you find the commands (Save, Save As, Open, and Close) you commonly need for working with Excel workbook files. Near the bottom, the File tab contains a Help option that, when selected, displays a Support panel in the Backstage View. This panel contains options for getting help on using Excel, customizing its default settings, as well as checking for updates to the Excel 2010 program. Below Help, you find options that you can select to change the programâs settings, along with an Exit option that you can select when youâre ready to close the program.
Figure 1-2: Open Backstage View to get at-a-glance information about the current file, access all file-related commands, and modify the program options.
Bragging about the Ribbon
The Ribbon (shown in Figure 1-3) change...