Office Show: Excel 2010 rocks your data

Do you like to play with your data? Thought so. This Excel-centric Office Show episode plunges into the world of data visualization, and shows you how to get better-looking, more meaningful charts without banging your head against the wall. And we've got some amazing things to show you that some folks have done with Excel, including -- speaking of head-banging -- a music video from AC/DC done entirely within Excel. Strange but true! After the break, guest blogger and Excel expert Anneliese Wirth gives you more info on how to explore the new features of Excel.

I promised you more information about sparklines and slicers- two of my favorite things in Excel 2010!

Sparklines

To recap, sparklines are like baby charts that fit right inside your worksheet cells.  You use them to visually interpret a bunch of numbers and detect trends in your data. In the following table of sales figures, the sparklines tell you that with one exception, each category has its low point relatively early in the month. If you were to just stare at the numbers, it would take a lot longer to spot the pattern (and the exception).

Do you want to know more? If so, check out the following articles, videos, and blog posts.

General information

• Use sparklines to show data trends
• Video: Insert sparklines to show data trends
• New for Excel 2010: Sparklines
• Crabby Office Lady loves sparklines
• Sparklines in Excel
• Adding some spark to your spreadsheets

Formatting tips

• Formatting sparklines
• Sparklines - lining up the points
• A sparkline trick - using the horizontal axis as a reference line
• One more sparkline trick
• Sparkline axis options

Slicers

If you use PivotTables, slicers will make your life a lot easier. Slicers are visual controls that allow you to quickly filter your data in an interactive way. By looking at the buttons, you can see exactly what's filtered and what's not. In this case, you're looking at customers with 1 or more children who also hold an undergraduate degree or higher:

Like sparklines, slicers are easy to use and customize. Here are some resources to help you get started:

General information

• Use slicers to filter PivotTable data
• Video: Use slicers to filter PivotTable data
• What do Slicers slice in Excel 2010?
• Easy (and even fun!) data exploration: Introducing slicers
• Interacting with slicers

Formatting tips

• Dressing up your slicers

-- Anneliese Wirth

Note from Doug: We'll have some upcoming posts on AC/DC and some of the other cool things we showed at the end of the episode. In the meantime:

• To see more of Nitin Mehta, who created the "Matrix" style effect in Excel, check out his site, Engineers-Excel.com.
• Daniel Ferry's Excel Hero blog is really worth seeing; you can seriously spend a LOT of time going through his optical illusions and charts.
• Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne created the AC/DC video for Sony, you can see more of Phil's work at his website.