Welcome to Excel Video 372, the first video on Excel 2013! Excel 2013 has some really cool features that I think will help you a lot. As powerful as the new features are, one of the first things we’ll do is turn off animation in Office 2013. The way I’ll show you how to do it turns animation off across your computer. There’s a way to edit the registry to just turn animation off for Office 2013, but editing the registry is beyond the scope of what I try to do in these Excel Videos. If you like the animation, fine. If you’re like me and can do without it, here’s how.
I want to show you two things in Excel Video 2013. The first thing is some add-in menus. To get PowerPivot in Excel 2013, you need the Pro Plus version or the Enterprise version. To get the Data Mining and Analysis menus I’ll show you, you don’t have to Excel 2013, but you do have to connect Excel to SQL Server Analysis Services. Connecting to SSAS is beyond the scope of these videos and probably requires some IT help or a friendly consultant. The good news is that if you have SQL Server in your office for your PM or EHR system, you may well have a version that includes SSAS. The potential for data mining if you have these tools is tremendous.
I’m going to talk about data mining with these new menus at MGMA’s Annual Conference in San Diego in October. The session’s called Business Intelligence for Medical Practices and is Tuesday afternoon at 2:00. I hope to see you there. If you’d like to see some of these data mining tools in action in future Excel Videos, please contact me.
The other thing I want to show you is a new feature called Flash Fill. Excel is a whole lot better at seeing patterns in your data. If you give Excel a few examples, it can fill in columns of data for you that used to take complicated formulas. We’ll start talking about Flash Fill next time. I look forward to seeing you then.
