“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 25th 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.
It Begins with Our Customers…
When we began planning for Excel 2013, we started by doing a ton of customer research. Yes, we do this every release, but this time our goal was really to cast the net wide and get a sense of the full spectrum of users, from the spreadsheet dabblers to the analysts and “super-crazy power user” (you probably know a few of these Excel gurus). We visited small businesses, home offices, “consumers”, and large organizations, and observed Excel users in action. We conducted surveys and focus groups, mined the blogosphere, interviewed people 1-on-1, and consulted our MVPs, friends and families. And we listened to feedback from past releases. Then we took some time to wallow in the resulting data and do some analysis (go figure — we’re the Excel team, we like to analyze.). The insights we gained from this customer research played a major role in our decisions about where to invest.
We proceeded into development with 4 major areas of investment, with one consistent theme across all of them: empowering our users. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, Excel is a powerful application – and many of our users have become experts at harnessing that power and turning that into results: lists, spreadsheets, reports, business solutions, in-depth analyses, dashboards, etc.
Enjoyable Experience, With More Smarts Built in
Powerful, Integrated Business Intelligence Capabilities
There is so much to tell about BI and Excel 2013…consider this a teaser.
Excel, Everywhere You Need It to Be
New Office Application Model
We’re eager to share everything Excel 2013 with you in more detail, and we promise that we will. Stay tuned for more posts about Excel 2013, and please try it out for yourself by going to the Office 2013 Customer Preview site!”
About Advanced Network Consulting:
If you current IT consultant is unresponsive to your business needs, takes too long to return messages, or cannot provide on-site service, consider giving Advanced Network Consulting a call. We provide excellent IT support and service for Southern California small and medium size businesses. Our certified technicians are friendly, personable, and professional. Our clients concentrate on what they do – grow their business while we secure and maintain theirs. Our complimentary on-site evaluation gives you a chance to get to know our technicians, quality of work, and level of commitment to your business. To schedule a meeting, call 562.903.3992. We look forward to helping your business prosper.