[ Editor's note: This is a review of the final, shipping version of Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac, provided to Macworld by Microsoft in advance of the suite's general release.] represents the largest step forward for serious Mac spreadsheet jockeys in many years, more so than either ( ) or ( ). There are literally hundreds of improvements, some very noticeable, others not quite as much so. The big news for power users is the return of macro support (more on that later), but there’s good stuff to be found for Excel users of all levels. Some uneven performance issues and a lack of Mac-standard features, however, prevent this version from Excel from attaining perfection. The interface Excel 2011 looks much different than its 2004 and 2008 predecessors. Gone are the numerous floating toolbars and the floating formatting palette. .dav video player for mac pro. Excel 2011 replaces all of those floating bits with two toolbars (standard and formatting) and the Ribbon, a collection of small tabs that provide easy access to often-used commands.

Learn how to use Excel for Mac 2011 to create different kinds of charts—from column, bar, and line charts to Gantt and exploded pie charts—and understand how to decide which type works best for your data. How to filter a pivot table with multiple values on Excel 2011 Mac? I imagine this must have been asked and answered before, but I couldn't seem to find an answer to this exact scenario, and I'm hoping someone else can point me to one. I'm on Mac using Excel 2011. This means I don't have 'slicers', which is all my Googling kept turning up.

You can customize the Ribbon, or even disable it if you wish. It's context sensitive, so it changes to match the task at hand. For example, if you double-click an image, the Ribbon will open to a greatly improved set of image-editing commands.

The Ribbon and toolbars are now integrated in each Excel window, so there’s nothing floating around outside your workspace. A couple of optional floating windows remain, but they’re not required in most typical spreadsheet work. The Ribbon’s tabs are compact, and the Ribbon itself can collapse to a single row of tabs when not in use. As a result, the new Excel’s work area doesn’t feel smaller than that of the older versions. With the interface now contained in a single window, working with multiple workbooks at once is simpler.

For example, you previously couldn’t compare formulas between workbooks, because the formula bar existed only once for every open workbook. Now each workbook has its own formula bar. Other minor touches abound. There’s a full 32-bit color palette instead of 40 colors. Drag-resizing a window now updates it in real time, instead of merely dragging an outline. SmartArt has over 150 pre-made templates (up from 80-ish), all of which you can customize.

A media browser provides fast access to photos, audio, movies, clip art, symbols, and shapes. For the most part these new features work quite well. There is some lag when you live-resize windows, even on current hardware, but the delay is bearable. UI overhaul: Excel’s new all-in-one-window interface with the Chart ribbon open. Working with spreadsheets Beyond the visual overhaul, Excel 2011 provides many new or improved ways of working with spreadsheets and the data they hold.

Right up front, you’ll notice a new Workbook Gallery (similar to the Template Choose feature in [ ]) that appears when you launch the application. Although it doesn't contain a ton of stock templates, you can browse a huge online template collection directly from the gallery window. Tiny, yet helpful: The new sparklines provide useful insight in a single cell. One of Excel 2011’s innovative new features is sparklines, which are simply graphs of data values that appear within a single cell. Instead of building a full chart to look for a trend in your data, you can often use a sparkline to show what you need to see in a simpler and quicker manner.