If you work on small spreadsheets using popular functions, Excel on Mac should perform as well as the Windows version. For larger scale data analysis (more than 100,000 rows and/or 100 columns with functions), Excel 2010 on MacBook Pro is really slow and crashes quite frequently. Jun 9, 2016 - For years, Microsoft Excel was the obvious choice, but as. And if one person didn't have an updated version of Excel, you. Windows and Mac OS X. But many people prefer Sheets to Excel for. June 10, 2016 at 7:39 am.
One of the advantages of doing the last Office 2016 product review is that I can leverage work others have done to save you, the reader, some redundant explanation. So if you haven’t yet, check out the reviews of,. Much of what you’ll read about in those apps applies to, too: Mac-specific features like multi-touch gestures, full screen support, Retina graphics, a cleaned-up and easily-hidden ribbon, a fixed task pane that replaces floating palettes for formatting, integrated support for OneDrive, and excellent cross-platform file compatibility.
You can read more about these features in the above-mentioned reviews; they work just the same way in the new Excel. (As with the other apps, you can only presently get Excel 2016 if you’re an Office 365 subscriber.) What else is new When you launch Excel 2016, you’ll be greeted by Excel’s clean new appearance. You can choose from a colored header (new in 2016) or the usual gray header from previous releases. Workbooks with multiple tabs get a much cleaner tab bar, losing the fake 3D appearance. Colored tabs are now colored with a thin bar, instead of a gradated fill on the entire tab, making it easier to read tab names. Overall, I found the new interface pleasant and easier to use than in older versions of Excel. Excel includes the Smart Lookup feature found in other Office apps.
Smart Lookup uses Bing to show contextual information for a highlighted word—while this is undoubtedly useful in Word, I didn’t really find myself using it much while working on spreadsheets. But if you suddenly need to look up everything there is to know about the word “amortization,” Smart Lookup is ready for you.
So what’s new and unique to Excel 2016? Quite a few things, starting with the removal of the Standard and Formatting toolbars. While you could hide these in Excel 2011, they’re completely gone—replaced by the task pane—in Excel 2016. I don’t miss them at all, as they were redundant and took up screen space. Also new is greatly improved sharing. Save your file to OneDrive, and you can then use a sharing button to invite people via their email address, copy a link you can then email to others, or send the workbook as either a PDF or native workbook attachment. Recipients can (assuming you grant permission) edit your file, even if they don’t own Excel, through Microsoft’s web-hosted Excel app.
Fans of pivot tables will find a new slicer tool that greatly increases the usability of pivot tables. A slicer is a way to limit the data you see in a pivot table. In a pivot table showing years of sales by salesperson, for example, you can use slicers to restrict the table to one or more years, or to one or more salespeople. Slicers let you limit what you see in a pivot table; you can add one or more to really refine what you see.
Here, only data from 2012, 2013, and 2015 is visible. Another “new” feature is the inclusion of the Analysis Toolpak add-on. I say new in quotes because while new to Excel 2016, long-time Excel vets will remember the Analysis Toolpak from the pre-OS X days.
If you need to do complex statistical and/or engineering analysis—think Anova, Fourier Analysis, Regression, etc.—you’ll find the Analysis Toolpak invaluable. Also included are a number of formulas that were previously found only in Excel 2013 for Windows, improving cross-platform compatibility. Again in the interest of cross-platform compatibility, many Excel for Windows shortcuts now work on the Mac, which is quite useful if you regularly work on both platforms. Excel also makes charting easier by analyzing your data and letting you select a recommended chart from a convenient drop-down menu. Select the data you want graphed, click the Recommended Charts button, then browse the mini chart previews to find the one that best matches what you’re trying to say. Excel 2016 helps you pick the right chart by analyzing your data and presenting a list of charts you can use to visualize that data.
What’s gone If you’re a serious user of Excel’s macro facilities, you are in for a big letdown: Excel’s 2016 support for macros is. While you can create and record macros, the macro editor is crippled: there’s no way to insert procedures, modules, etc. About all you can do is hand-edit a recorded macro. Further, you can’t create custom menu commands, as you could in prior versions of Excel. (Microsoft details is Visual Basic support in a ).
In short, if you need macros, stick to Excel 2011. After the great progress made with macros in the 2011 release, this is a real letdown. Assuming the macro issue doesn’t affect you, the only other real problem I have with Excel 2016 is the loss of customizability of keyboard shortcuts and menus. In older Excel versions, you could easily customize which commands show on which menus, and even create entirely new menus containing just the commands you specify.
This dialog in Excel 2011 allowed you to easily customize Excel’s menus and commands—even adding a new menu to the menu bar, if you desired. You could also assign one or more keyboard shortcuts to any Excel command, including commands that you can’t program via OS X’s keyboard shortcut interface. The dialog that handles all of this customization is missing from Excel 2016; if you don’t like what Microsoft gave you for menus and certain shortcuts, you’re stuck with them. A related issue is that some familiar—and useful—shortcuts are now changed or gone. Control-I and Control-K used to insert and delete rows or columns; now you must use three fingers (Shift-Command-Equals) to add a row, and Command-Minus to remove a row.
You also used to be able to Option-click a row or column to quickly add a new blank row or column; this no longer works. If you use the keyboard a lot, you’ll want to open Excel’s help and search “keyboard shortcuts,” where you’ll find a huge list of shortcuts. Bottom line If you’re an Excel user who doesn’t rely on macros, and doesn’t need to customize your menus and commands, Excel 2016 has a lot going for it. The new interface is pleasant, the cross-platform features are a welcome addition, the performance is very good, and the Mac-specific features make Excel feel as native as any other Mac app. But if you do need macros and customizability, then you’re going to have to stick to Excel 2011and that’s too bad, because Excel 2016 is a solid release in every other regard.
Advertisement Excel is a powerful tool for so many things, but having to resize the sheet to fit your screen every time you open a file can be a major pain. Here are three quick solutions that can make your spreadsheet much easier to view. Here at MakeUseOf, we’ve shown you how to use Excel for things like It's two days before your taxes are due and you don't want to pay another late filing fee.
This is the time to leverage the power of Excel to get everything in order., general The pivot table is one of the single most powerful tools in the Excel 2013 repertoire. It is frequently used for large data analysis.
Follow our step-by-step demonstration to learn all about it., or even just It's no secret that I'm a total Excel fanboy. Much of that comes from the fact that I enjoy writing VBA code, and Excel combined with VBA scripts open up a whole world of possibilities. Regardless what you’re using Excel for, wouldn’t it be nice to be able to have your spreadsheet open up automatically so that you can see all the data on your screen? Wouldn’t it be sweet if your printouts contained every column resized so that it could fit on one sheet? Using one of the three steps below, you can accomplish this. Fit All Columns to Screen When you’ve opened a spreadsheet with more than a dozen columns or so, or maybe with very large text columns, it doesn’t take long for the end of the sheet to run off the right side of your screen. People often put up with this because they think there’s no other way.
The truth is that Excel is one of Do you really need Excel? Both desktop and online solutions have their advantages. If you have trouble choosing between Excel and Google Sheets for managing your spreadsheets, let us help you decide.
For this — reconfiguring your sheet display so that all columns fit on the screen is actually pretty simple. The answer is to automate the resizing one time, so you never have to think about it again. Using VBA to Fit to Screen What better way to Excel and 10 minutes of work will give you more detailed information about your computer than you ever thought possible.
Sounds too good to be true? That's Windows, if you know how to use it.? With For those of you that would really love to be able to write your own application, but have never typed a single line of code before, I'm going to walk you through making your very., you can add some code to the Worksheet.Open method to automatically resize the sheet to fix the screen.
To make this easy, first select the entire first row of the sheet (including all columns you want to fit onto the screen). Right click anywhere in the highlighted row, and choose Define Name. In Office 2016, if “Define Name” is not an option in your right-click menu, highlight the first row with all columns you would like to auto-fit to the screen, then for Name a Range and select the respective result. You’ll find that “Workbook” is the Scope selected, and the sheet name and range is already filled into the Refers to: field.
Just type in a name for the range that you’ll remember, into the Name: field. In this next step, you’ll need to click on the Developer menu item, and choose View Code from the Developer menu. If you don’t see the Developer option in your menu, you’ll need to enable it by going to File Options Customize Ribbon. Make sure Developer is selected here. Once you click View Code in the menu, make sure to double-click the ThisWorkbook object, and on the right pane choose Open from the list of methods on the right drop-down menu. Then, paste in the code shown above into the function WorkbookOpen. For your convenience, select and copy the text below into your function.
![Excel Excel](/uploads/1/2/5/5/125501642/972598310.png)
Range('DefinedRange').Select ActiveWindow.Zoom = True 'Cells(1, 1).Select The last line is optional. Basically, if you include it, the sheet will move back to the left side so that the first cell is selected and the view is centered toward the top, left side of your sheet.
When you save your workbook, you will have to select a macro-enabled file type, i.e. Now, every time you open your Excel file, it’ll automatically resize the sheet so that every single column fits inside the computer screen you’re using, regardless of its resolution. Fitting All Columns When Printing Another problem people face when actually printing out their spreadsheets, even though all columns fit onto the display, is having all columns fit onto the printed paper sheet.
This is a real annoyance, but the fix is fast and easy. Dann recently showed you a A beautifully crafted spreadsheet loses all its appeal when it comes printed on nine sheets of paper, with half of them empty. We show you how to get everything nicely on one single page., but personally I prefer the fast and simple rescaling approach. When you choose Print from the File menu, you’ll see in the print preview that not all of the columns are on the preview. Scroll down to the bottom of the print menu, and click on the Page Setup link. In the Page Setup menu, under the Page tab, you’ll see that under Scaling, the option to Adjust to 100% normal size is selected by default. This will make the sheet print at it’s original size, whether or not the whole sheet will fit.
It’ll just print the rest of the worksheet on multiple pieces of paper, which is completely useless. Instead, select Fit to: and then change the tall setting to a ridiculously high number that’s much higher than the number of papers your spreadsheet will actually need for printing. This ensures that the sheet will only be “squeezed” to fit all columns on the sheet, but won’t resize the rows of the sheet.
This is because if the rows are resized, it’ll mess up the final formatting. By only forcing all columns to fit, your spreadsheet will print to one sheet wide, and as many pages as needed to print all of the data. Excel Fits Right In In the end, Sometimes, a simple spreadsheet format isn't engaging enough to make your data accessible. A dashboard allows you to present your most important data in an easy-to-digest format., no matter how massive it is, to fit everything on one PC display, or on one printed sheet, really isn’t that complicated. You just have to know the right trick to use to accomplish it! We’ve showed you a lot of In a giant Excel spreadsheet, CTRL+F will only get you so far.
Be clever and let formulas do the hard work. Lookup formulas save time and are easy to apply.
Through the years, but now you know all three tricks for getting your data to look and print exactly the way you want it to. Don’t forget to share these tricks with all of your friends and family! Do you know any other ways to quickly fit a spreadsheet onto a computer screen of any resolution?
Share your own tips and tricks in the comments section below! Image Credit: by Pretty Vectors via Shutterstock Explore more about:,.