As one of the key applications in Microsoft Office, Excel is already packed with incredible functionality. The most recent version, Excel 2016, adds new capabilities from databases to handwriting tools. Let’s take a closer look at these new features in Excel 2016.

1. New types of charts in Excel

The ability to visualize data with an Excel chart has always been a valuable and powerful ability. Excel has six new charts to show your work. New chart types include Waterfall, Treemap, Pareto, Histogram, Box and Whisker, and Sunburst.

Pareto sorts the bars by highest first and shows which bars have the most impact or the highest return. Use the data in this chart to decide where to allocate your resources.

Waterfall (also known as a ‘flying brick’ chart) provides a visual method for viewing a series of positive and negative data, such as monthly cash flows or stock prices. Because the bars seem to float between the start and end columns, it looks like a kind of waterfall, hence the name. The waterfall chart is one of the most interesting and visual new features in Excel 2016.

2. Main improvements in the database

Excel 2016 now comes with built-in functionality that makes it easy to transform and query your data. These new database enhancements, including the amalgamation of some of the older add-on programs such as Power Pivot and Power Query, more than justify the upgrade. Find them in the Get & Transform group on the Data tab.

3. Quick analysis tools

Quick analysis tools are a real time saver, helping to steer you in the right direction with your data. Once you’ve completed your spreadsheet or table, select the entire range. Look for the lightning bolt worksheet icon in the lower right corner of the range – click this icon and a pop-up menu will appear showing half a dozen options on what to do with this data.

In Excel 2016, business analytics is now easier and faster, with streamlined data analysis, new forecasting capabilities, and new built-in functionality for obtaining and transforming data. Excel 2016 also deliberately supports Power BI, a new tool for visualizing data and creating interactive reports.

4. Easier sharing and collaboration

Collaboration is increasingly built into Office 2016. Choose Share on the ribbon to share your workbook with others on SharePoint, OneDrive, or another online location.

For files stored in OneDrive for Business or SharePoint, you can go to File> History to see a full list of changes that have been made to your workbook and even access previous versions.

5. 3D / Power Maps

Excel’s popular 3D geospatial visualization tool Power Map has been renamed and is now integrated into Excel 2016. With these tools you can create a visual history of your data, for example you can compare data such as temperatures, precipitation or populations. of a certain region during a specific time, represented in three-dimensional images. These tools are found by clicking 3D Map on the Insert tab.

6. Improvements in the pivot table

Pivot tables in Excel are a flexible and powerful way to analyze data, and it’s even better with these new features in Excel 2016:

  • Automatic relationship detection which discovers and creates relationships between the tables used for your workbook data models.
  • Automatic time grouping helps you use your time-related fields such as year, quarter, month by automatically detecting and grouping them on your behalf. Although grouping by time is available in previous versions, it is now automatic and much easier in Excel 2016.
  • Pivot Table Lookup Options The field list helps you get to the fields that are most important to you in your entire data set.

7. Graphics improvements

Formatted quick shapes, such as colored squares with rounded edges, have been available in Word and PowerPoint for several versions. Finally, Excel 2016 has new shape options with preset styles to help make it quick and easy to add well-formatted shapes to your workbooks.

The new Excel 2016 templates include sample data and charts, plus practical exercises that teach you how to use each template.

8. Ink equations

Do you want to add a math equation to a worksheet? With the new Ink Equation feature, you can convert your handwritten equations (or math problems) into text, so you can insert them into your documents. You can use whatever tool works best for you (the mouse, a stylus or stylus, or even your fingers) to write the math equations.

9. Tell me

Look at the right side of the Excel 2016 ribbon menu after the last tab, to see a text box with a lightbulb that says “Tell me what you want to do.” Just enter the words and phrases related to the steps you want to take below and quickly get the functions or actions you want to use. You can also choose from recently used searches and use this option to drill down to other help options.

10. Smart search

The smart search feature, which is available in most Office 2016 programs, gives you access to quick searches from within Excel 2016. Also called Bing’s “Insights,” information is drawn from various resources such as Wikipedia, the Oxford Dictionary, Bing Image Search and Bing Snapshot.

Just hover over any word or highlight any phrase on your spreadsheet and right click. Then choose Smart Search from the drop-down list. The “Insights” panel opens and displays information and images about the highlighted topic.