lynda.com has been rolling out training on Office 2010, which launched to business customers earlier this month. I’ve been talking to our Office 2010 authors about their experiences with the latest version of Microsoft Office. Today’s Q&A features Bob Flisser, author of Excel 2010 New Features.

Q: In your opinion, what’s the most interesting new feature in Excel 2010?

A: Since Excel was already a mature application, I couldn’t imagine how Microsoft could improve it for 2010. Now that I’ve been using it for a while, I’d have to say the most interesting–which to me means fun–new feature is Sparklines. (Yes, I said a spreadsheet program is fun.)

Let’s say each row on your worksheet lists a product you sell, and each column shows the amount of a different month’s sales. With a couple of clicks, you can insert a tiny trend line or bar graph contained inside a cell at the end of each row, showing how sales of the product rose or fell over the months. If there are 20 rows, there are 20 miniature charts. With a couple more clicks, you can apply formatting that brings out exactly the information you need.

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