top 7 new excel features to use

Microsoft Office 2019 just released which means Microsoft Excel 2019 just released too. Filled with new features and upgrades of all the Office 2019 applications, Excel has actually the most extensive collection of new features. This blog outlines some of the best new Excel features and explains how to access them.

1) NEW CHARTS

Let’s start with featuring new charts

HISTOGRAMS AND PARETO CHARTS

Histograms show you frequencies (e.g. how much of one product has sold against another). They’re not based on categories but on values that are allocated into different bins. If you want to alter this to show categories you can do that. Pareto charts go one step further by sorting these frequencies and adding a cumulative percentage line to give you a trend through the data.

SUNBURST CHARTS

Sunburst is basically a multi-level hierarchical pie/donut chart. Each level of the hierarchy is a ring or circle; the center circle is the top level and it works its way outward. Sunburst charts allow you to go to dozens of levels so you can really drill down into your data.

TREEMAP CHARTS

Treemap shows hierarchical data in a tree-like structure. Notice that colors and rectangle sizes are used to represent data, somewhat like a rectangular pie chart.

FUNNEL

The Funnel shows the progressive change within an ordered data set as a percentage of the whole. It’s good for data that gets progressively larger or smaller with each data point.

3D DATA MAP

This chart is perfect for analyzing data with a global span (e.g. a company sales report where the company operates with a global client base). Obviously, you need locational data to use this type of chart and you can then add other fields to build your picture.

The chart will give you a map of the world with bars or columns in the locations that have fields attached. What’s more, if you set this against a particular period of time the chart will allow you to record a simulation video showing the change in values over that period. It’s great for presenting sales growth to the board or your team.

2) IMPROVED AUTOCOMPLETE

When you are entering a formula, AutoComplete is more helpful now; you don’t have to spell the function name exactly right for it to be able to guess what you want.

3) LINKS TO DOCUMENTS

Inserting hyperlinks isn’t new, but inserting hyperlinks to documents have been awkward to do in the past. Now, on the Insert tab, there’s a Link button that opens a menu of recently used cloud-based files or websites. You can select one to insert a hyperlink to it, or you can choose Insert Link to open the Insert Hyperlink dialog box.

4) EXTERNAL DATA NAVIGATOR

It’s now easier to work with the external data that you import into one of your worksheets thanks to the addition of the new Navigator dialog box. When you perform external data queries with text files, web pages, and other external data sources (such as Microsoft Access database files), the Navigator dialog box enables you to preview the data that you are about to download as well as to specify where and how they are downloaded.

5) GET & TRANSFORM (POWER QUERY) IMPROVEMENTS

There are some new connection types, such as SAP HANA, and the data transformation features in the Power Query Editor are much more numerous and robust now.

6) PIVOT TABLE IMPROVEMENTS

There are lots of little improvements here that add up to a lot more convenience. For example, you can now personalize the default PivotTable layout. The PivotTable feature also now can detect relationships among the tables and can detect time groups and automatically apply them. You can also drill down in PivotCharts now with drill-down buttons, and you can rename tables and columns in your workbook’s data model.

7) POWER PIVOT IMPROVEMENTS

The Power Pivot feature also has been improved in numerous ways. For example, you can save a relationship diagram view as a picture that you can then import into Word, PowerPoint, or any other app that accepts graphics. The Edit Relationship dialog box has gained some features, such as the ability to manually add or edit a table relationship.