Wonderful stuff (MS Excel 2000)

Member Name: thehud

Product:	MS Excel 2000
Date:	09/06/01 (144 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Industry standard, Powerful, Flexible

Disadvantages: Expensive

I’ve already give my thoughts about the Microsoft Office suite of programs under Word and I’d just summarise here by saying that because the Office suite is so popular and widely used, it’s made all the component parts equally popular and well liked.

Word has its detractors, but the Excel spreadsheet application is absolutely peerless and widely acknowledged as such. It stole the lead generated on early doors by Lotus 123 and is now clear market leader in the sphere of office products. It’s one of those industry standard products which generates new users each and every day, although it’s fair to say that the preponderance of Microsoft Office in the company arena had a significant boost in the early days.

I myself am a whole hearted supporter of Excel and have found nothing better. I started with other spreadsheets back in the 80’s and found switching over to be a little fraught, but since I’ve become comfortable with the program, I’ve found myself to be more and more enthusiastic. I’d also just like to say that I use some of the out of the way features like databasing and functions and macros, but I steer clear of things like pivot tables and some of the more esoteric marginal functions, so I'd class myself as a fairly proficient standard user, rather than a professional. Excel is aimed at the full range of users, however, from the beginner to the professional expert and manages to pull off a programn that hits all the bases.

Spreadsheets are such logical and user friendly things that everyone seems to have grasped the basics and started to embrace the possibilities, but it’s probably worth just briefly mentioning some of the things that new users do find a little complicated. Excel is no different in their ease of use than other spreadsheets, so this part is more about the general program than Excel in particular.

Mathematics and brackets – this can get qu
ite confusing, especially when you’re using functions and nested maths and it’s easy to get the wrong number of brackets, which renders a formula unworkable, but with Excel the error finding tools are pretty halpful.

Absolute cell references – these are a devil to explain to non users and probably are the biggest drawback to people making best use of Excel.

Macros – these are quite hard to grasp, but the learn and copy facilities in Excel are first rate in building your understanding.

Generally, I’m very impressed by the power and flexibility of Excel – it is strong on graphs, charts and graphics and the text box tool means that you can quickly put together extremely professional looking reports and documents. The way you can group worksheets together so that you can make mass changes across an entire workbook is also a neat touch and the macro facility can allow even quite inexperienced users to build quite powerful automated programs. The database options are a fine addition and mean that you can carry out most of the simple querying tasks on slabs of data without having to resort to the more complicated Access database program.

All in all, I have very few quibbles with the program – it is quite expensive to buy, but is worth every penny and I’d suggest you look to do a deal when you buy a new system to have it as part of the package because that’s the cheapest way to get in and you can then buy the less expensive upgrade options. Another low cost way to get on the ladder (if there’s a student in the family – see, kids do have some uses) is to but the student version which is a great deal cheaper than the normal price.

For business users, it is almost mandatory that you are a competent user of Excel and so whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to clamber onto the bandwagon one day if you haven’t already done so, and I can recom
mend Excel for its intuitive interface and ease of use. You’ve even now got the facility to capitalise on the Internet compatability and add hyperlinks and searches to the spreadsheet to make your spreadsheet readily updatable from real world data. I remember Masterclass’ Richard Topping showing that particular possibility several months ago in one of his tutorials and was suitably impressed.

The other brief point to note is the facility to customise the toolbars and make it very personal to your own needs and working practice. That's a marvellous facility, though you need to set up when you reinstall or upgrade. Oh well!

Once you’ve got into Excel, all sorts of possibilities arise and you’ll never look back – I can promise you that much. Enjoy!!

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