Microsoft Excel 2013 offers many new features and functions worth exploring. This post provides a few highlights and a link to my May-2013 CalCPA Technology and Business Resource Guide article, “Spreadsheet Nerdiness” which goes into more detail.

Summary

Design

With the exception of some minor cosmetic changes and some animations, the design is similar to Excel 2010 and will feel comfortable when you migrate. One notable difference is that each workbook gets its own window, similar to Word, so users with multiple monitors will be thrilled.

Features

Slicers work with Tables now, and FlashFill provides an alternative to concatenation and text-to-columns when combining and splitting columns of data.

Functions

Over 50 new worksheet functions appear in this version of Excel, most of which relate to engineering, statistics, and trig. Some of the more interesting new functions are FORMULATEXT, ISFORMULA, WEBSERVICE, and FILTERXML.

Add-Ins

The Inquire add-in allows you to compare two versions of a workbook to identify differences, including formula, computed value, and stored value differences, among others. This add-in rocks.  PowerPivot is now more polished and more integrated as it ships with Excel and is no longer delivered as a download.

Online

The Excel App Store extends the capabilities of Excel through Microsoft and third-party apps, such as a date picker control. Microsoft has continued the integration with office web apps and online collaboration.

More Information

Please feel free to check out the online version of the full article.

Microsoft highlights what’s new in Excel 2013 and, they also compile all of the new functions.