Microsoft Office Excel provides powerful tools and features that you can use to analyze, share, and manage your data with ease. The user interface makes it easy for you to work in Microsoft Office Excel. Commands and features that were often buried in complex menus and toolbars are now easier to find on task-oriented tabs that contain logical groups of commands and features. Many dialog boxes are replaced with drop-down galleries that display the available options, and descriptive tooltips or sample previews are provided to help you choose the right option. No matter what activity you are performing in the new user interface—whether it's formatting or analyzing data—Excel presents the tools that are most useful to successfully complete that task.

To enable you to explore massive amounts of data in worksheets, Office Excel supports up to 1 million rows and 16 thousand columns per worksheet. Specifically, the Office Excel grid is 1,048,576 rows by 16,384 columns, which provides you with 1,500% more rows and 6,300% more columns. For those of you who are curious, columns now end at XFD instead of IV. Instead of 4 thousand types of formatting, you can now use an unlimited number in the same workbook, and the number of cell references per cell are increased from 8 thousand to limited by available memory. To improve the performance of Excel, memory management has been increased from 1 GB of memory to 2 GB in Office Excel.

You will also experience faster calculations in large, formula-intensive worksheets because Office Excel supports dual-processors and multithreaded chipsets. Office Excel also supports up to 16 million colors. You can use conditional formatting to visually annotate your data for both analytical and presentation purposes. To easily find exceptions and to spot important trends in your data, you can implement and manage multiple conditional formatting rules that apply rich visual formatting in the form of gradient colors, data bars, and icon sets to data that meets those rules. Conditional formats are also easy to apply—in just a few clicks, you can see relationships in your data that you can use for your analysis purposes.