Excel 12 (beta 1)

Excel 12's spreadsheets can be bigger than ever, with as many as 1 million rows and 16,000 columns. With the increased capacity come fine-tuned tools to visually map data. You'll be able to quickly create a chart and grab a preferred style from the template galleries or save your favourite styles for later use. Heightened interactivity within pivot tables aims to help you recognise trends faster. For example, in a few clicks, Excel 12 can select and highlight the best- and worst-selling products within a sales report. This won't change the ability to manually apply changes by hand either. Word 12 and PowerPoint 12 share the same charts and diagrams, so you can more easily integrate your custom look and feel across the files in the Office 12 system. And as with the files within the other applications in the Office 12 system, Excel 12 will adopt XML-based files with better compression and smaller file sizes by default.

The very features that set Excel 12 far apart from its predecessor could also be its weakness. Radical interface changes could bewilder users who have spent the last two years memorising the locations of commonly used functions. And while Excel 12's interface and graphics will look dramatically different, we don't see improvements in other areas, such as better surfacing of ways to make common calculations. We also wonder whether technophobes using Excel for ultra-basic tasks will appreciate the dynamic response of the command tabs on the interface ribbon, or if they'll instead find the constant shifting a distracting nuisance.

This early beta version of Excel 12 attempts to help users better manage, visualise and share data. We look forward to testing Excel 12 (beta 1) further to find out how well it handles our own spreadsheet tasks. For images of the new style and features, check out our image gallery of Excel 12 (beta 1). Read our preview of Office 12 (beta 1) for an overview of the changes coming to the rest of the Microsoft Office system.