Because Excel is such a vital part of your Finance department’s processes, you can bet employees are interested in what the latest version of the software offers.
Although Microsoft hasn’t confirmed a shipment date for Office 2013 (expected in late 2012/early 2013), a public beta version of the software recently became available.
David H. Ringstrom, of Accounting Advisors, Inc., offers a great review of the trial version, which is heavily integrated with Microsoft’s Cloud-based SkyDrive storage platform. However, users can still save documents to a local disk.
What’s new?
Here are a few of the notable features in Excel 2013 that Ringstrom described:
A quick analysis feature: By right-clicking on a selection of cells, users can preview conditional formatting, charts, totals, tables and sparklines.
Flash fill: This new feature on the data menu is designed to generate patterns of data for Excel users.
Recommended pivot tables and charts. Based on the source data that is selected, this tool automatically builds pivots tables and charts, so users don’t have to do it by hand.