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

1. New types of charts in Excel

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

Pareto orders the bars by highest first and shows which bars have the greatest impact or return. Use the data in this graph 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 appear to float between the start and end columns, it looks like a waterfall, hence the name. The waterfall chart is one of the most interesting and visual new features in Excel 2016.

2. Important 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 merging of some of the older add-ons like Power Pivot and Power Query, more than justify the upgrade. Find them in the Get & Transform group on the Data tab.

3.Quick scan tools

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

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

4. Simple collaboration and sharing

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 complete list of changes made to your workbook and even access previous versions.

5. 3D / Energy Maps

Excel’s popular 3D geospatial visualization tool, Power Map, has had a name change 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 like temperatures, rainfall, or populations. . of a given region during a specific time, represented in three-dimensional images. These tools are found by clicking 3D Map on the Insert tab.

6. Pivot table improvements

Excel PivotTables are a flexible and powerful way to analyze data, and they’re even better with these new features in Excel 2016:

• Automatic relationship detection which discovers and creates relationships between the tables used for your workbook’s data models.
• Automatic time grouping helps you use your time related fields like year, quarter, month by automatically detecting and grouping them on your behalf. While grouping by time was available in earlier versions, it’s 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 dataset.

7. Graphic improvements

Formatted Quick Shapes, like colorful squares with rounded edges, are 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 come with sample data and charts, plus hands-on exercises that teach you how to use each template.

8. Ink Equations

Want to add a math equation to a worksheet? With the new Ink Equation feature, you can turn 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—your mouse, a digital or light pen, or even your fingers—to write the math equations.

9. tell me

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

10. Smart search

Available in most Office 2016 programs, Smart Search gives you access to quick searches from within Excel 2016. Also called Bing “Insights,” the information is based on various resources such as Wikipedia, the Oxford Dictionary, Bing Image Search, and Bing Snapshot.

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