Via email, I got this kinda perplexing question:

i heard that the new excel doesn’t have pivot tables – why are you keeping macs out of business???

I’m trying to figure out where this came from, and I’m not quite sure.  Excel 2008 already had pivot table support (to get started with pivot tables in Excel 2008, check out Create a pivot table report in the Excel help, and there’s a Lynda.com tutorial for it too).  My only guess about this confusion is that someone might have misunderstood Walt Mossberg’s review, in which he noted that Office:Mac 2011 doesn’t have all of the features of Office 2010 for Windows, such as pivot charts in Excel.

In Excel:Mac 2011, we made a big investment in improving matters for our power users, which includes some great improvements to pivot tables.  If you’re an Excel guru, check it out and tell us what you think.  I think that Excel gurus will especially appreciate the performance improvements.

Chris asked:

Did they take the GUI formula builder called “Calculator” out of Excel? It was in Excel 98, X, 2004, 2008 and I don’t see it in 2011? In 2008 you would go to “customize toolbars & menus” click on the commands tab and then drag the calculator to your toolbar or menu of choice. The description Excel gave it was “Helps you create basic arithmetic calculations in Excel by offering a layout that is based on a ‘real’ hand-held calculator.”

I wasn’t sure of the history of that calculator, so I asked my colleague Schwieb.  I got lucky: as it turns out, he’s the guy who wrote it originally.  Schwieb said it was added to Excel:Mac in 2001 with the intent of gradually introducing people to formulas.

Now, ten years later, things have changed.  For basic calculator functions, there’s the OS X built-in calculator.  In Excel 2011, there is instead the Formula Builder (which you can see by going to the Formulas tab in Excel and then selecting the Formula Builder icon).  The Formula Builder is much more powerful than the old calculator, and is a great way to learn more about all of the formulas that are in Excel.  I’m pretty good in Excel, but I have to admit that I use the Formula Builder when I can’t recall a formula’s name or its arguments.

The Excel 2011 help has a lot of great information about formulas.  Play around with the Formula Builder and see how it can help you learn more about how to use formulas, too!

Jimmy asks:

How many rows and columns are there in Excel 2011?

As in Excel 2008, we match the support of our friends in Windows Excel.  We support 1 million rows and 16,384 columns.

If you’ve got a question about Office:Mac 2011, you can see the ones that have already been asked over here and leave a comment if yours hasn’t been covered yet.