This blog post is brought to you by Jane Liles Group Program Manager for the Excel team. With this post she kicks off a brand new blog series introducing all the features we have added across Excel for the release of Office 2013.

Greetings from the Excel team hallway…

By now you’ve hopefully tuned into our Office Next blog, which provides all-up view of our latest release for Office, and seen some articles on the web. Today I have the privilege of sharing a high-level view of Excel 2013, a release that arrives on the heels of Excel’s 25^th anniversary. The team has been working hard to deliver the next version, and we’re excited to be able to share Excel 2013 Preview with you and hear your feedback.

Excel is a powerful spreadsheet and data analysis application, with hundreds of capabilities that can help you organize and make sense of the data and numbers in your life. We’ve made several investments in Excel 2013 to empower our users by bringing these and more capabilities to you in ways that are easy, intuitive, and enjoyable. But before I tell you about where we focused our efforts, I’d like to share a little about how we got there.

There have been ample articles about troubleshooting unintentional circular references in Excel workbooks. This post focuses on the opposite: choosing to deliberately work with circular references. Circular references aren't a bad thing in itself: you can use them to achieve complex calculations that are otherwise impossible to do, but first you must set them up properly.

Puget Sound Pets can't keep enough dog chews on the shelves for all the corgies they sell. And they can't keep up with the sales data they generate from their booming business. To better understand their revenue stream, they need to view it on a month-to-month and a store-to-store basis.

Excel's Auto Outline feature offers a simple way for them to do that by letting them group--limit or expand--the types of data they can view.

The Excel Consolidate feature provides an easy way for a coach to merge data from different expense worksheets into one main budget.  By using the Consolidate feature, the beleaguered coach can get a handle on his team's expenses so he can focus on teaching the Decatur Golden Gators to score goals.

It's often helpful to create charts that compare different types of data. For example, you might want to compare overall revenue with the number of units sold. To do that you need to know how to use different chart types in one chart and how to use a secondary vertical axis to plot values that are in a different value range. Read more to learn how. (Sample workbook included)

Many of you already know how to use Excel's AutoFilter feature to do basic data-sorting; for example, how to use it to select a single name from a long list of names. But what if you want to do more advanced filtering?  Excel's Advanced Filter feature can help you out. 

He's no slouch! Melvin Corpuscle shows his accounting teacher a thing or two by walking him through how he used conditional formatting to make low and high sales numbers stand out.

In this week’s webinar, you’ll get an overview of two tools in Excel for crunching numbers so you can know what the numbers mean to your business: PivotTables and Slicers (new to Office 2010).

References for this webinar:

• So you asked about PivotTables
• Quick Start: Create a PivotTable report

Excel spreadsheets are all about numbers. But tons of numbers are often not the most effective way to communicate what you want. That's where charts come in handy. Charts can display numeric data in a graphical format, making it easy to understand large quantities of data and the relationships among data.

If you want to learn about Excel charts, you've come to the right place. We've pulled together out best tutorials and articles to get you started.

A lot of you want to know the difference between gridlines and borders. Gridlines help you work in a spreadsheet, and borders help you highlight important information in one for your audience. Gridlines appear automatically so you can see how your data is organized into rows and columns; borders need to be added by you so you can highlight certain cells. This post describes how to work with both of them.