Introducing Excel 2002

Excel 2003 is a powerful spreadsheet program that can help you create worksheets and invoices and do both simple and sophisticated number crunching ; it is designed to help you calculate the results of formulas and analyze numerical data. Excel 2003 provides a number of enhancements over previous versions of Excel. Some of these enhancements are as follows :

• Designate a Range as a List Excel allows you to designate a range of cells as a list. You can then manipulate the list using list menus provided at the heading row of the list. You can quickly sort or filter data in the list.

• Statistical Functions Improved Although you won't necessarily "see" the enhancements that have been made to the statistical functions in Excel such as standard deviation and the forecast function, a number of Excel's statistical functions have been made to compute and round more accurately.

• Document Workspaces Document workspaces can be created on a SharePoint server that is accessible from the Web. This allows different users to collaborate on Excel workbooks that are stored in the workspace.

• Compare Side by Side With A new command on the Windows menu allows you to compare two worksheets side by side in the Excel window. This makes it easy to view changes that have been made to a worksheet where other users have made changes to the original worksheet.

• Research Task Pane As with the other applications in Office 2003, Excel has access to the Research task pane, which can be used to find financial and other information stored on the Web.

Excel 2003 has had the latest makeover from the previous version of Excel when compared to the other members of the newest version of Office (such as Outlook and Access). We take a broad look at a number of Excel features in Part V of this book. In the balance of this lesson we will look at two new features found in Excel 2003, creating a list from a worksheet range and comparing worksheets side by side.