I've been using Excel 2007 since October 2005. It is the best new release of Excel ever. With 1.1 million rows and great new features, Microsoft completely outdid themselves.

Except for the #$%@ Ribbon.

When you upgrade, you will spend the first couple of days wondering, "Now where would they have hidden the XYZ feature?". It is absolutely maddening.

In the past, I have sold a laminated tip card. I redesigned the tip card for Excel 2007. One entire side of the larger tip card is designed to get you over the hurdle of figuring out where things are on the new Excel 2007 ribbon. Now, I have to be honest. I WANT you to upgrade to Excel 2007, because I have written a bunch of new books about Excel 2007. If your only hurdle against upgrading is finding things on the ribbon, then it would be in my best interest to give you the tip card for free. So, here it is:

• Free Download Excel 2007 Tip Card (pdf).

If you don’t want the hassle of printing the card in color, you can buy our laminated version of the card:

• Purchase a single laminated Excel 2007 Tip Card.
• Purchase a 5 pack of the laminated Excel 2007 Tip Card.

If you access to a color printer, please print at least side 1 in color and hang it on your cube wall while you are new to Excel 2007.

If you like free stuff, you can also get a chapter a week of one of my new books, Excel 2007 Miracles Made Easy. Really - there are no strings attached - you can get the whole book, free, although slowly. I did this with Learn Excel from MrExcel and the results were fantastic - 5 million chapters given away, 60+ 5-star reviews at Amazon, and sales ended up outpacing my previous book by a factor of three. It seems like a good formula - I give the book away, and karma takes care of the rest.

Of course, If you want to spend your company's money, then please feel free to buy some of my Excel 2007 books listed here.

Here is the concept behind the front side of the Excel 2007 tip card:
I show every menu from Excel 2003. To the right of each menu item, I've added a block of color. As an example, here is part of the Data menu:

At the bottom of the card, I have color-coded the Excel 2007 ribbon tabs. Here is a part of the ribbon:

It is easy to follow the logic:

• Data Subtotals is in Green in the Excel 2003 menu. That means you can find it on the Data ribbon in Excel 2007.
• Data Sort is in both red and green. That means it is either on the Home tab or the Data tab.
• Data Form is in black. That is bad...it means that Microsoft left it off the ribbon, and you will be diving into customizing the Quick Access Toolbar if you need this feature.

The front of the card translates all of the Excel 2003 menus, plus the standard and formatting toolbars to the Excel 2007 ribbon in this way. Other tips talk about customizing the Quick Access Toolbar and some ribbon hints.

The back of the card give you more tips on using Excel. This is similar to the old tip card that I probably sold to you for $2. If you did pay $2 for the old card, consider this your free upgrade! Actually, I have a few thousand of these being printed and laminated, so I will probably try to convince you to buy one with the nice glossy lamination as part of an Excel 2007 bundle some day, but for now, download the card from above.