Using Microsoft Office Excel for Data Analysis - Overview of Microsoft Excel

Screenshot of Microsoft Excel Worksheet

Microsoft Office Excel is a powerful tool you can use to create and format spreadsheets, and analyze and share information to make more informed decisions. With the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, rich data visualization, and PivotTable views, professional-looking charts are easier to create and use. Microsoft Office Excel , combined with Excel Services, a new technology that will ship with Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, provides significant improvements for sharing data with greater security. You can share sensitive business information more broadly with enhanced security with your coworkers, customers, and business partners. By sharing a spreadsheet using Microsoft Office Excel and Excel Services, you can navigate, sort, filter, input parameters, and interact with PivotTable views directly on the Web browser.

Create Better Spreadsheets

• Take advantage of the Office Fluent user interface
• Enjoy increased spreadsheet row and column capacity (1 million rows by 16,000 columns)
• Quickly format cells and tables
• Formulas authoring experience 
• Create professional-looking charts 
• Use Page Layout View 

Improve Spreadsheet Analysis

• Use conditional formatting 
• Sorting and filtering 
• Create a PivotTable or PivotChart view 
• Full support for Microsoft SQL Server Analysis Services

Share spreadsheets and business information with others

• Use Microsoft Office Excel and Excel Services to more securely share spreadsheets with others
• Create business dashboards from spreadsheets and share within a portal
• Save as XPS or PDF for easier sharing
• New Excel XML Format enables a more efficient exchange of information

Manage business information more effectively

• Centrally manage sensitive information by publishing spreadsheets to Office SharePoint Server
• Protect confidential business information 
• Connect to external sources of information using the Data Connection Library
• Take advantage of the Excel calculation engine in other applications

Source: Microsoft Office Excel Product Overview