The New Excel 2007 Features

Some of the features in Excel 2007 are memory intensive. If your computer is running sluggishly, you can turn off several of these memory-intensive features, which are found in the Popular category of the Excel Options dialog:

Show Mini Toolbar on Selection
This feature is popular in Word, but it rarely appears in Excel. You actually have to select a few characters from a cell while the cell is in Edit mode. The mini toolbar provides quick access to text formatting tools.

Enable Live Preview When you hover over a gallery, the worksheet previews the change before you click the gallery item.

You can also turn off the following features, which are found in the Advanced category:

Alert the User When a Potentially Time-Consuming Operation Occurs
When this option is set, Excel alerts you when a potentially time-consuming operation occurs. By default, Excel warns you when an operation will affect more than 35,554 cells. You can change the cell threshold, or simply turn this feature off. If you are about to do a subtotals command, you need to invoke the command whether it will take a long time or not.

Enable Multithreaded Calculations
This option enables multithreaded calculation, which affects you only if your computer has multiple processors. Excel can now make use of both processors in order to speed up calculation time. Note that the first recalculation of any workbook takes longer than normal because Excel has to build two calculation trees. Subsequent calculations are faster.

Group Dates in the AutoFilter Menu
This setting causes daily dates to be grouped into months and years for easy selection in the AutoFilter drop-down.