Microsoft Excel 2007 RTM

If you regularly rely upon Excel and plan to upgrade, then prepare to school yourself in its new ways. We suspect that Excel 2007 will be a worthy upgrade for people whose bread-and-butter work involves spreadsheets--especially those that require quick visual analyses of data. However, this may not be the case if you've already memorized old Excel formulas and don't need the visual pizzazz.

The new interface places formulas and other number-crunching tools within drop-down menus for quick reference.

From the Microsoft Office menu in the top left of the screen, the Excel Options button lets you customize the program and its toolbars.

We kept forgetting how to sort the data in Excel 2007 columns. To do that, click the Home tab--not the Insert tab, our first impulse--and look in the Cells box.

Like most of the other Office 2007 programs, Excel lets you shrink a page view to 10 percent of the page or enlarge it as much as 400 percent by sliding a bar in the lower-right corner of the screen.

When you highlight desired rows and columns, Excel lets you pick from among many Table Styles galleries to add instant color.

You can create your own table style and save it to use later in future spreadsheets.

You'll find Excel's column-sorting options on the Data tab.

Also under the Data tab, among other advanced functions, you can ask Excel to flag potentially duplicated data.

Conditional formatting options let you highlight data in a spreadsheet and instantly paint patterns, such as making cells red that contain numbers within a precise range.

Conditional formatting also allows you to select spreadsheet cells and apply arrows, flags, and smiley-face icons to analyze the ups and downs of data values.

While most of the galleries within Office 2007 are designed to let you mouse over a style and preview it on the fly, Excel's Chart Type and Chart Styles don't work that way. Instead, we had to click on a type or style and apply the change to see it reflected in a chart.