Excel 2007 documents – easy on the eyes

One of the themes we focused on with Office 2007 was “great looking documents”. For the next half-dozen articles, I am going to explain what that means for Excel, and some of the cross-application features that users will see in Office 2007.

Office 2007中我们集中研究的主题之一是“精美的文档”，接下来的六篇文章将诠释这对Excel来说这意味着什么，并且用户将在Office 2007中看到office应用程序间交互的特点。

Way back when we were starting planning for Excel 2007, we talked to a lot of people about the documents they created using Office, and we looked at many, many examples of people’s work. We asked them about what they found difficult, what they would like to see fixed, and what they thought good-looking output looked like. We also looked at many examples of “professional” output, drawn from textbooks, business journals, scientific journals, and professional design firms. During our planning, it became clear that there was still a lot of additional capability that we could add in this area that would benefit all sorts of users, so we set out to really improve Excel’s capabilities in this area in a number of ways. Specifically, we set out to:

早在我们开始设计Excel 2007时，我们和许多用户就他们在使用Office创建文档进行了交谈，并且仔细地研究了大量在实际工作中应用的例子。我们询问他们在使用过程中碰到的困难是什么，他们愿意看到固定的样式是什么，他们认为美观的输出是什么样的。我们也从教科书、商业杂志、科技杂志和专业设计公司中研究了一些“专业”输出的例子。在我们设计过程中，需要改进的思路变得清晰了，在这个方面我们仍然能够添加一些额外的功能，使各类用户都能从中受益。于是，我们通过使用多种方法对Excel在这个方面的功能进行改进。具体地讲，我们着手做了以下工作：

Address existing limitations in Excel that made it challenging to create modern-looking documents Make formatting documents much faster and simpler Provide professionally-designed content available out-of-the-box Make it easy to see what your work will look like printed as you create it Make it easier to maintain your spreadsheet and update formatting Address some long-standing print-related customer requests Provide some examples of great-looking documents Make it easier to move your content (i.e. charts) to other Office applications (i.e. PowerPoint) without hassle Do this all in a way that is consistent between Word, PowerPoint, and Excel, so that users can apply features from one application in other applications针对Excel存在的局限性进行改进，使其能够创建现代风格的文档。使格式化文档更简便快捷提供专门设计的可利用的且具有独创性的内容容易看到你的工作成果，就像已经打印出来的一样更容易维护电子表格和进行格式更新满足一些长期从事与打印相关的顾客的需求提供一些美观的文档的示例更容易移动你的内容(例如图表)到其它Office应用程序(例如PowerPoint)在Word，PowerPoint和Excel中的所有操作方法都是一致的，因此，用户能够将某个应用程序的特点应用到另一个应用程序中

These goals translated in to the following work:

我们为实现这些目标做了以下工作：

Changing the number of unique colours allowed a single workbook from 56 to 4.3 billion (32-bit colour) (see post here) as well as adding some new visual effects, like gradient fill. Vastly improved charting. This will be covered in more detail in a later series of posts, but you can check out this post for some visuals that should give you an idea. Improvements to Excel’s existing cell styles feature, and the addition of styles for Tables, PivotTables, and Charts (see here and here for information on Table styles and PivotTable styles) “Galleries” of professionally-designed styles (for all the objects previously listed) A new view – Page Layout View – to supplement Normal and Page Break Preview "Live preview" of formatting Click-and-type headers and footers Some print-related features commonly requested by customers“Document Themes” (colour, font, and effect variations that can be shared between Office applications) Updates to Office shapes (think Drawing toolbar) and WordArt ~25 great-looking templates available out-of-the-box增加在工作薄中可显示的颜色数从(原先的)56色到(现在的)43亿(32位色)(见这里)，也添加了一些新的视觉效果，如渐变填充。极大的改进了图表。这将在后面的一系列文章中详细介绍，也可以先从这篇文章中看出一些端倪。改进了Excel中现有的单元格样式特点，添加了条件格式到列表，数据透视表和图表（详细的表格样式信息和数据透视表样式信息见这里和这里）专业的“图表”样式(以前列出的所有的对象)一个新的视图——页面布局视图——补充到了普通视图和分页预览视图中格式的“现场预览”单击即可输入页眉和页脚顾客普遍需要的一些与打印相关的特点

“文档主题”(颜色，字体和效果变化能在Office应用程序间共享)

更新了Office界面外观(绘图工具条)和艺术字25个美观且具有独创性的实用模板

So that’s the introduction. Next time, I will cover some of the limitations we have changed as well as changes to cell styles.

就介绍到这里，下次我将介绍对这些改变所作的一些限制，就像对单元格样式作的改变一样。