More and more blog readers or customers who still use an older version of Excel ask me: What can a new Excel version do that my version doesn’t yet? Should I upgrade?
If you’re one of those who’s considering upgrading to a newer version or not, this article might help a little. I have tried to list the most important changes that were introduced with each version:
Excel 2010
Excel 2013
Excel 2016
Two more remarks:
The following lists are not exhaustive. Many additional improvements take place on a small scale and often make it easier to use.
New features in Excel 2010
Surface
The new menu ribbon introduced with Excel 2007 is now finally customizable. The meaningless Office button was removed and replaced by the more obvious File menu. Add-ins can now be configured directly from the developer tools menu
editing features. Also There is now an integrated screenshot tool that allows you to create and edit snapshots directly in Excel.
The “Insert content” function has become much clearer and simpler and also offers a live preview of the result. In formatted tables, the column headings (and thus also the filters) are always displayed, even if you scroll down in long tables.
Conditional Formatting
There are additional symbol sets and data bars. In the formatting rules, you can finally access values and references in other worksheets (within the same workbook)
diagrams.
Individual diagram elements can be formatted more quickly: A double-click on the element now opens the formatting window. The so-called Sparklines were introduced.These are small diagrams within a cell. This allows tables to be visually enhanced without having to create an additional correct diagram.
pivot tables.
Data cuts: Pivot tables can thus be filtered very easily and in a user-friendly way. Ideal when creating dashboards. The autofilter now includes a free text search box for easier filtering of long value lists
data analysis
The powerful query tool called Power Query is available as a separate add-in. Even huge amounts of data can be loaded, filtered and transformed and then processed in Excel. The Solver-Add-In, which is already available in Excel 2007, gets an improved user interface with new functions (this allows you to create what-if analyses).
Table functions
Compared to Excel 2007, more than 50 new table functions have been introduced, most of them in the area of statistics. A real highlight in any case is the AGGREGAT function.
New functions in Excel 2013
Let’s move on to the next version: Here, a lot has changed in terms of ease of use and functionality compared to the 2010 version.
User interface
The complete optic is now adapted to Windows 8. Straightforward and simple.
Each workbook is displayed in its own window. What some users find confusing is a huge advantage when working with multiple screens. Until now, you had to open several Excel instances, which led to severe limitations when exchanging data between two instances.
Editing features
This almost magical feature inspires me again and again. Excel automatically fills a column with the appropriate values based on a few entered examples. Quite ingenious, for example, if you want to split addresses entered in the https://www.techgyd.com/key-features-microsoft-office-2010-home-student/40484 single cell.
Diagrams
Excel makes recommendations for suitable diagrams based on the selected data.
Live preview: When selecting a diagram, a live preview with the real data is always displayed. Once a diagram has been created, it can be optimized with just a few clicks using three new buttons. This allows you, for example, to show or hide diagram elements (titles, labels, etc.) or change the formats without detours.
Pivot tables
Excel also supports the creation with recommended pivot tables. If you are not sure how to best evaluate your data, you can get inspired here.
A real highlight are the new data models
They allow several source tables to be evaluated in a single pivot table. As in relational databases, relationships between several tables can be established. A very comfortable filter option for pivot tables has been created with the timelines. Date values can be filtered via a timeline.
Data Analysis
With the data sections introduced in Excel 2010 for pivot tables, formatted tables can now also be filtered. A pivot table is therefore not necessary.
Quick analysis: This allows you to evaluate the data of a selected table with a maximum of 2 steps. By diagrams, conditional formatting, sparklines or via a formatted table. And there is always a live preview. Super practical!
Table functions
In addition to the table functions available in Excel 2010, all kinds of really useful functions have been added. Examples are listed below:
ISOCALENDAR WEEK
ACTUAL FORMULA
FORMULA TEXT
New functions in Excel 2016
Even if it’s hard to believe, Excel 2016 also offers some news that could encourage one or the other to switch. The focus here is on charts and data analysis.
There is a search function in the field list. This can be very useful, especially if you have included several tables with many fields in a data model.
Also really practical: The automatic grouping of date fields. If a date field is used in the pivot table, Excel creates groups for year, month and/or days.
Data Analysis
In Excel 2010 and 2013, Power Query had to be retrofitted with an add-in. Since Excel 2016, this tool has been fully integrated into Excel’s data menu (“Retrieve and Transform”). In addition, there are some new data sources to access external data directly. A completely new function is the so-called forecast sheet.
This allows you to create forecast diagrams from a selected table with practically just one click. And finally, Power-Map, which was previously only available via an add-in, was integrated as so-called 3D maps. This makes it possible to present data very impressively on three-dimensional (land) maps.
