Excel 2016 Available Today!

It has just been announced that Microsoft Office 2016 (including Excel 2016, of course) has now been released.  It is available as a one-time download or you can subscribe to Office 365 for a monthly charge and regular updates.  I know I’ll be downloading it later this afternoon (what Fun!).

So, what is New in Excel 2016?  Well, many things, actually.  Here are a few of my personal favorites:

  

Enhanced Pivot Tables

Pivot Tables are, as most of us know, hugely powerful and convenient tools that enable quick analysis in minutes that may otherwise take hours.  Although the last iterations brought Power Pivot, the 2016 version has introduced the following cool new features (plus more…):

•   Automatic Relationship Detection and Time Grouping
•   PivotChart Drill-Down Buttons
•   Searchability

More Sophisticated Forecasting

The FORECAST function in the 2016 version of Excel now includes the option for doing Exponential Smoothing.  Having extensively used smoothing in the past, I can attest to the desirability of this new addition!

  

New Chart Types

Being a big fan of visual representation of information, I naturally was delighted to see the addition of the new:

• Treemap
• Sunburst
• Histogram
• Box & Whisker
•  Waterfall

3D Maps

Speaking of “visual representation”, Power Map has renamed to 3D Map, and is innately available to all Excel users.  As with its predecessor, the 3D Map tool provides an excellent way for making discoveries in data that might never be noticed in traditional two dimensional maps.

There are, of course, many other new and worthwhile features in Excel 2016.  Get your copy and find out which ones are your favorites!