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What’s New In Excel 2010?

Apparently, the Office 2010 Technical Preview was released today. I don't have a copy but PC World has covered it: Office 2010: A complete Overview of What's New

Here's what it says about the only Office 2010 app that I'm interested in:

Not much new in Excel

Excel hasn't been touched as much as the other major applications in Office 2010, but there have been some useful additions. The most important is called "Sparklines" -- small cell-sized charts that you can embed in a worksheet next to data to get a quick visual representation of the data. For example, if you had a worksheet that tracked the performance of several dozen stocks, you could create a Sparkline for each stock that graphed its performance over time, in a very compact way.

Conditional formatting -- the ability to apply a format to a range of cells, and then have the formatting change according to the value of the cell or formula -- has been improved as well, including the addition of more styles and icons.

As with other Office 2010 applications, Excel has new tools for sharing data with other people, including multiple people working on a document at a time.

For businesses, Microsoft is touting a Project Gemini add-on for Excel 2010 that can handle very large amounts of data -- even worksheets that include hundreds of millions of rows. It will ship as part of SQL Server 2008 R2 in the first half of 2010; a community technology preview will be available in the second half of 2009.

No surprises.