Excel 2016: can you spot the differences?

• Author: Lenning, Jeff
• Position: Tech Falk

Microsoft recently released Office 2016, and with it, the next version of my favorite program--which is, of course, Excel.

The user interface is about the same as 2013 and you'll feel right at home. Microsoft focused on expanding Excel's data visualization capabilities by introducing several new chart types and on Excel's ability to import and transform data from a wide variety of external sources. Let's walk through the improvements that caught my attention.

Consistency Across Platforms

Microsoft has been working to make the Excel experience more consistent across platforms. In previous versions, Excel for Mac felt much different than Excel for Windows. Now, when I run both and compare them side-by-side, they are similar--not identical, but much closer. I've included screenshots from Excel for Mac and for Windows in figures 1 and 2. Can you tell which is which?

This is a welcome update for Excel users, because it means we can simply learn Excel and use it regardless of operating system or device. Although I primarily use Excel for Windows, I do occasionally use Excel for Mac, iPad and the web--and I'm happy they have a similar interface.

External Data

If you retrieve data from external data sources, you will be pleased with Excel 2016. Capabilities previously only available via the separate Power Query add-in are now built into Excel. For example, you can now define queries and data transformations in Excel. This is great news if you frequently work with data that comes from external sources because it will reduce the amount of manual effort required to get and prepare data for use. The related commands are found on the Get & Transform group, on the Data ribbon tab.

As I look through the options in the New Query command icon, I see many supported data sources, such as Oracle, IBM DB2, MySQL, Hadoop, Active Directory, Exchange, SalesForce and Facebook. This opens up many opportunities to streamline the data acquisition process.

Data Visualization

Excel users who present data and information graphically will be happy to know that there are several new chart types, including waterfall, treemap and histogram. The ability to...