Computerworld -
Have you come to Microsoft Excel 2010 by way of Excel 2007, or did you skip directly from Excel 2003 or an earlier version? Those in the former group are likely to have a very different upgrade experience from those in the latter group.
If you're in the former group, you'll find a few small interface tweaks and a handful of useful new features in Excel 2010. If you're in the latter group, you'll find an overhauled interface that radically changes how you interact with common features and functions.
Either way, we've got you covered. This cheat sheet shows newcomers to the interface how to get around; it also explores features that are brand-new in Excel 2010. We've noted which sections of the story former Excel 2007 users can skip over.
Don't miss our other Office 2010 cheat sheets: Word 2010, Outlook 2010, PowerPoint 2010 and SharePoint 2010.
To continue reading, register here to become an Insider
It's FREE to join
Options
Here's where you can customize the way Excel looks and works, taking care of everything from how text and formatting marks display, to what buttons appear in the Quick Access toolbar, to proofing options and more.
New to Excel 2010 is the ability to customize the Ribbon. After you click Options, click Customize Ribbon, and you can choose what you want shown on each of the Ribbon's tabs.
The Options screen, accessed via Backstage, is where you can customize the way Excel 2010 looks and feels to your heart's content.
Click to view larger image.
Show trends with Sparklines
Though creating charts and graphs in Excel has become easier over the years, such visualizations are often overkill. They take up space, and sometimes you spend more time getting the look right than you should.
New in Excel 2010, Sparklines are smart, simple graphics you add to a single cell to give quick visual representations of data, especially data that changes over time -- for example, unit sales of a particular item over the course of several years. A Sparkline can show you at a glance the historic ups and downs of that item.
Sparklines come in three flavors: line, column and win/loss. As with any Excel chart, the Sparkline is redrawn automatically when you change the data in its data range.
To create a Sparkline, move your cursor to the cell where you want to insert the mini-chart. On the Insert tab, find the Sparklines group in the middle of the Ribbon. Click on the type of Sparkline (line, column, win/loss) you want. In the pop-up dialog box, choose the source range (the data you want to plot) and click OK.
Notice that the Ribbon changes to display the Sparkline Tools/Design tab, where you can modify the properties of the graphic -- switching among the three types of Sparklines, changing the overall color scheme or adding color to individual elements. Negative values can be displayed as red dots (in line Sparklines) or red columns (in column and win/loss Sparklines).
Sparklines can be customized in several ways. This win/loss Sparkline has been enlarged by increasing the row height.
Click to view larger image.
Slice and dice your data with Slicers
The process of working with data in PivotTables was much improved in Excel 2007, and Excel 2010 goes a few steps farther. Filtering data has been considerably streamlined with the inclusion of Slicers, which are small windows that make it easy to click values to add or remove them from a PivotTable filter.
In the example below, Slicers for State and City have been attached to a PivotTable. Clicking a value on a Slicer includes or excludes it from the filter. (Blue shading indicates that a value is included; white means it's not.)
Slicers are easy to set up. Click anywhere in a PivotTable, and on the PivotTable Tools tab that appears in the Ribbon, choose Options --> Insert Slicer. Choose the field you want to filter from the list of fields in your PivotTable, then choose OK. Excel opens a Slicer window with a button for each existing value in the selected field.
If you want to limit the results to California, define a Slicer for the State field, then click on just California in the new State Slicer. If you Ctrl-click on Oregon, Excel will update the PivotTable to show results from just those two states.
There are some limitations to Slicers. Once you select a field to display in a Slicer window, you can't subdivide it or group values -- you can't create a Slicer by calendar quarter for a "month" field, for example. You can sort Slicer buttons from A to Z or from Z to A, but you can't specify your own order (such as North, South, East, West).
Slicers can, however, be moved about your worksheet and resized. They're a good choice for creating dashboards, and they're intuitive for even novice users to work with. You can also use the same Slicer in different PivotTables; we provide the steps for doing so later in this story.
You are previewing premium content. 
Free Insider Guide
