First Look Microsoft Office 2010, by Katherine Murray

Microsoft Free E-book Offer Has Something For Everyone
First Look Microsoft Office 2010, by Katherine Murray
Have you downloaded the Microsoft Office 2010 beta? I’ve been using it for a while and couldn’t wait until our First Look Microsoft Office 2010 became available. Although I consider myself to be an intermediate to advanced user of Office applications, I can tell by reading the table of contents that I have a lot to learn about the newest features in Office and using the applications to their fullest extent. I’ve only had the new e-book for a couple of days, and I’ve already learned how to use two new tools in Excel 2010.
While using the beta, I noticed that the Office team added a couple of cool new features to Excel, one of my favorite programs. Sparklines and Slicers are compelling for analyzing data, but are not easy to use at first. I was thrilled to see that our author covered those features in this book. I followed the step by step instructions and here were my results:
Sparklines allow you to create little charts within a cell to help you visually notice patterns in your data. Rather than reading numbers in a row, I can create a Sparkline and see how our book sales are trending. If you want to try this yourself, Kathy gives you the steps in chapter 5.

If you love pivot tables as I do, you’re gonna love Slicers. They allow you to slice data and extend pivot tables to show your data in a variety of scenarios. Here’s how I used slicers (also covered in chapter 5). Once I created a regular pivot table of my data, I clicked on “Insert Slicer” and chose which field I wanted to use to slice my data. With this feature, I can click on the different topics to filter sales on particular categories.