What's New in Excel for Mac 2011

The tools you want, when you want them

The new Microsoft Office for Mac ribbon helps you find the features and commands you want to complete tasks quickly.

You’ll find the commands you already know how to use, in an intuitive, easy–to-use interface, right at the top of the application window. Your home base is the Home tab, which holds the most frequently used tools, such as font and paragraph formatting. Other commonly used tools, such as those for page layout, tables, charts, and SmartArt, can be found on their own tabs.

In addition, specialized tools appear on the ribbon when you need them. When you format a chart, the Chart Layout tab appears to reveal tools to customize the chart and give your workbook a more professional appearance. Click any cell, and the tools on the Home tab appear again.

Want to adapt the ribbon to your particular style of working? You can customize it by rearranging tabs and showing or hiding group titles in a tab.

Read more: Familiarize yourself with the ribbon
Interactive Ribbon Guide: Find where a command is located
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Manage your data by using Excel tables

Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011 helps you organize data easily. Quickly create, format, and expand an Excel table or apply designer-quality styles to give tables a professional appearance. It’s also become easy to clean up data in tables. You can delete duplicate table rows with the click of a button.

Summarize your data with PivotTables

Spend less time sifting data and more time analyzing it with PivotTable reports. The new PivotTable user interface helps you find insights and relationships in your data. And Excel makes it easy to get started with PivotTables because you can automatically build a table with a single click. After you create a PivotTable, take advantage of features to summarize, analyze, and format your PivotTable data. Use styles and banded reports to make your data look professional and attractive.

See just what you want to see

The improved Excel filter helps you sift and sort large amounts of data, so you see only the data that you care about. In addition to sorting and filtering based on values, you can now find data based on cell color, font color, or cell icons. You can also combine criteria to filter for the precise data that you’re interested in. Have long lists of data? No problem. Let the improved search do the looking for you.

Bring meaning to the surface – with bold visual indicators

You can visually annotate your data for both analytical and presentation purposes by using conditional formatting. Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011 makes it easy to find exceptions and spot important trends in your data. Apply gradient colors, data bars, and icon sets to the values on the cell table. Apply the most popular conditional formatting options with just one click on the new Excel ribbon.

Spot trends by using sparklines

Sparklines are tiny charts that fit within a cell. They give you at-a-glance insights into your data. Sparklines reveal patterns to help you see trends, such as seasonal increases or decreases, economic cycles, or maximum or minimum values. Sparklines do more than just present data – they can help you immediately discern what your data really means.

Make every document look professional

The Excel Workbook Gallery provides professional-grade templates that you can customize by adding your own words, pictures, and favorite themes. Templates make it easy to perform common tasks in Excel, such as budgeting, creating calendars, and more.

The Excel Workbook Gallery displays templates in a large format that lets you see layouts, graphics, and fonts at a glance. And you’re not limited to the colors and fonts of the built-in designs. The color and font menus within the Template Gallery provide choices to customize and create a document that reflects your style.

Don’t see what you need? Use the search tool to quickly locate the type of document that you want to create and then preview it with the colors and fonts you prefer without even opening the document.

Access your files anywhere

You know that with your purchase of Microsoft Excel for Mac 2011, you have a professional, creative, and powerful application for the desktop. But did you know that Excel for Mac now also gives you access to your documents anywhere, anytime? The Microsoft Excel Web App, an online extension of Excel on your computer, extends your workspace to the Internet. Now, whether you’re in the office, at home, or on the road, the Microsoft Excel Web app lets you easily post, access, edit, and share your documents—all in one place. You can share documents with anyone, anywhere, even if he or she doesn’t own Excel. All you need is a computer with an Internet connection and a supported browser.

From the browser, you can check spelling as you type, apply font and paragraph formatting, and use other familiar tools, such as AutoCorrect. Make and save your changes, and you’re done!

Finish your work sooner

Whether at work or at home, you can boost efficiency and save time by using Visual Basic, available in Excel for Mac 2011. Create macros to automate tasks and add customization (menus, dialogs, and so on) to Office documents, so you can focus on being creative, not repetitive.

Protect valuable information assets

Help protect valuable digital information , such as financial reports, product specifications, customer data, and e-mail messages, from unauthorized people by using Information Rights Management (IRM) to restrict permissions. Choose from a variety of permission policies to define who can open, modify, print, forward, or take other actions with the information. IRM helps you restrict access to just those people whom you want to see the information.

Content with restricted permission can only be created by using Microsoft Office for Mac Standard 2011.

Help prevent unauthorized access to important information

Excel for Mac has improved password protection to help prevent unauthorized access to important information. It provides several layers of security and protection to control who can access and change the data in a workbook:

For optimal security, you can protect your whole workbook file by using a password. This allows only authorized users to view or change your data.
For additional protection of specific data, you can protect certain sheet or workbook elements, with or without a password. Use element protection to help prevent anyone from accidentally or deliberately changing, moving, or deleting important data.

What's New

What's New in Excel

Easy, familiar tools

Professional workbooks

Seamless compatibility

Enhanced security