Microsoft Excel Reviews

Pros

It is so versatile. I use it instead of Calculator as I can easily see what I am calculating. I have made a simple payroll system with it and have used it for many weekly tax calculations. Calculating using fields from other pages is fantastic. Really anything you need to do with accounting can be done with it.

Cons

Two things if you don't have it free with your computer then you have to buy it and it can be kind of expensive and if you want to be able to collaborate and make on the fly changes with others then you need office 365 and you have to pay monthly you can never own it.

Alternatives Considered

LibreOffice

Reasons for Choosing Microsoft Excel

While LibreOffice is the best option for free and that is a software for your computer, my wife ended up getting Microsoft office 365 free from work because of remote work so this is the main reason I have gone to excel as it is a little better and I didn't have to pay for it.

Switched From

LibreOffice

Reasons for Switching to Microsoft Excel

I do still use google sheets for mine and my wife's budget and we can change it on the fly at the same time if we need online. I used LibreOffice as my main until I got Office 365 from my wife's work. I think Excel is better than the other two in sheer offline and spreadsheet features but not sure I would pay more than about $50 for office 2019 and don't like paying monthly for 365.

Pros

Microsoft Excel is the best tool for tables and data management and visualization. I like the user interface, actually, I like the user interface of all Microsoft products it is easy to use and easy to access all functions and features. Excel is a very strong application dealing with data and tables that can deal with huge numbers of data easily and can manage huge data easily without much effort and time.

Cons

Excel has many and many features and functions and the user may need a lot of time to learn Excel. Also, there are some important functions that do not exist in Excel and you have to use a third-party application to use these functions, I hope in future updates they could add those functions as built-in in Excel.

Pros

The pros are thin on this software. I'll list them by number.

1. The software is over 20 years old and has been refined and recreated numerous times over that period.
2. It makes creating lists very easy when copying and pasting information from tables on web forms. It intuitively pastes tables by column and row quite accurately 99% of the time and enables you to take one column as a list and paste it anywhere else. This utility reduces the tedium of quickly conveying information to co-workers considerably.
3. The ability to import data by comma or tab delimited text files is also exceedingly powerful in reducing time spent listing or reporting on specific items in a format that is not conducive to pasting into a table, or perhaps powershell script derived data outputted to a comma delimited text file. As a computer engineer, this takes hours and hours of time and compresses it into minutes.
4. The formulas, while available on Google or other spreadsheets, are also good pros and help with calculating anything you need to do in terms of math from other columns, in my case and in short, capacity and utilization percentages of storage devices on hand.

Cons

What I like least are the frustrating things, and while few, these really irk me and stand out as a problem, especially in creating reports for people using the formulas, math and functions that spreadsheets are best known for. Case in point: The ability to copy and paste just the function into another spreadsheet that is open. It simply does not work unless you tab out of the existing cell and this is because, annoyingly, separate files, completely separate Excel spreadsheets, all act as if they're part of the same file. If I have one spreadsheet xlsx file open and a separate one open where I'm copying and pasting pertinent data from one to the other, it acts as if I'm in the same spreadsheet and the behavior is inexplicably wonky and unusable. I just want to copy the formula plain text as is into the cell of another spreadsheet because I want to use that same math for data related to other irrelevant items. Google Sheets does not do this at all. Maybe this was something Accountants wanted for some crazy reason that I'll never encounter as an engineer. But this is obnoxious and makes me scream at the computer often.

The other con is that I do not like the non-intuitive UI and clunky way to simply save files. It pushes One Drive, and pushes it hard like non stop telemarketing calls. Also, I just prefer the old way to save files. Call me old fashioned but it was simple. I don't need the whole screen to change when cling the file tab.

Pros

Throughout my professional journey, Microsoft Excel has proven to be an incredibly versatile and pivotal application to my success. Its simple search functionality makes everything readily accessible for me . One of the standout features I appreciate the most is the automation provided through formulas. It significantly saves time and effort by eliminating the need for manual calculations. By inputting numbers, Excel automatically adjusts the corresponding cells, streamlining the entire work process for me .

Cons

Although Microsoft Excel is an incredibly useful application in day-to-day life, its large capacity for handling data can sometimes become overwhelming. The sheer volume of data may cause the application to freeze or crash, posing the risk of potential data loss.

Pros

Excel is a tool that it is used every day and facilitates your work. For calculations, graphs, tables, data analysis, visual dashboards. For a company to grow you need to monitor progress by using KPI and KBI metrics. This tool will facilitate the metrics actualization by a having a data base that multiple people can have access to them. You choose which fields can be edited and which cannot. Fir dashboards is excellent.

Cons

Everyday I have something new to learn since it have a-lot of capabilities, but sometimes you need to know the correct formula

Pros

Microsoft Excel is a wonderful tool that exceeds expectations once you learn the capabilities.Microsoft has expertly designed Excel for maximum usage for all users. Initially I had minimal knowledge of the ability this application has and managed to seamlessly use the tools I required, however, steadily over time and by increasing my knowledge of the application and its abilities I have grown to see witness the incredible ability

Cons

Excel may often be confusing with some of the available tools for use, however, there are various tutorials online to assist in learnings.

Pros

I took a class to learn Excel 20 years ago. The product meets my needs and allows me full control over data input, design and reports. It’s a blank slate and my favorite Microsoft product. I use it in my personal business and my 8-5 job daily.

Cons

It is hard for a beginner to use at first. However, there are guides and videos online that are easy to follow and pick up. You get out what you put in.

Pros

I said to make the ability to save the ability to edit, dealing with all formats is smooth, and you can easily save and review all your data.

Cons

A software buttons interface can be added that can be programmed manually, as it saves a lot of work and effort.

Pros

What I loved about Excel is the ease of creating statistics and analyzes by creating data tables

Cons

Maybe the tool positions in the toolbar. But it does not affect his performance

Pros

The application allows you to visualize data excellently.

Cons

The ribbons change with some updates which means that you have to re-learn where buttons are. Also some formulas have changed over time.

Pros

Excel is one of the most powerful tools that is used daily in Fortune 500 corporations. From simple graphs and tables to complex VLOOKUP functions that I use daily, Excel can be used in home, offices, and schools. I find Excel extremely useful to store and manage data. Excel can handle every large data sets and is very intuitive to conduct simple data analysis and visualize it. I have been using Excel for more than eight years now, and I can vouch for the plethora of functionalities it provides to make our lives easier. From making Pivot Tables to conducting sensitivity analysis in my financial research models, Excel is a one-stop solution for quick modeling work. I have found that sometimes, it is much easier to transform and clean data in Excel rather than writing complex scripts in Python or MATLAB.

Cons

Excel's way of indicating errors in your formulas aren't always helpful to figure out the exact source of error. Plus Excel doesn't have an inbuilt autocorrection to check for spelling errors. You must double-check the spellings in your Excel model/document before sharing it with anyone.

Pros

This software is absolutely essential to my job on a day to day basis. The amount of functionality this software has is incredible (far superior to other products on the market). What I love most about this software is the way you can take raw data and create a formula, algorithm, graph, chart, etc that can tell a very detailed story. As an operations manager of a small company I have to wear many hats and all of my projects typically begin and end with Excel. Even though this product is more expensive to other free alternatives on the market, I would still consider Excel a must-have within any organization.

Cons

The price can be a determining factor for some people given there are free alternatives on the market today, but I would still recommend getting Excel because in the end you are getting more than what you pay for. There is a bit of a learning curve when it comes to using this software but there are numerous amounts of instructional videos online on how to use some of the complicated formulas this software is capable of. However, with a little bit of practice you will be able to interpret raw data with ease.

Alternatives Considered

Google Slides and WPS Office

Reasons for Switching to Microsoft Excel

I chose Excel over these alternatives simply because of the amount of functionality Excel has to offer. I enjoy the User Interface Excel offers and Excel is also more compatible to other devices, programs, and softwares than anything else on the market.

Pros

The ease of use, amount of functions, possibility of things can be done, writing functions within functions, giving link to cells between sheets and other Excel files.
It's almost possible to create a database-like structure using VOOKUPs, HLOOKUPs, which result in "Join"s.
Functions have not only basic operations such as sums, dot products, but also return statistical parameters too. For instance, one time I needed the slope of an array (I actually work as a data scientist and use Excel, too) and there was a function for this. All I need to do was to point out the array and Excel fits a linear regression in background, giving me the slope of it as I needed.
Not only that but availability of VBA extends the functions of Excel even furthermore. For that reason I cannot imagine anything Excel cannot do that one would be able to do on paper and pen.

Cons

As I explained above, I work as a data scientist and I sometimes deal with huge amount of data "BIG DATA". As much as I love working on Excel, unfortunately Excel sometimes cannot handle big data, especiaily if there are millions of rows. That's the only downside of Excel I can think of.

Pros

I have been using excel for my personal business to keep track of payments, addresses, participants, buyers, and much more. I think that it is good that excel has kept its basic format over the years. I learned how to use this software when I was in high school and I did not struggle because it is rather intuitive. As the internet has become even more popular, if I ever want to do something fancy on excel, all I have to do is google and get the directions. I think that this kind of ease of use for a small business person is incredible important, it is all I have used to keep track of these important financial things and it has worked out quite well for me.I also like that the software can be combined with word to generate mailings, lists, and other important things at work. The ease between the different software allowed me to teach much older generations. I think that keeping the formatting of excel was important because I have seen so many other software companies drastically change things and then suddenly no one knows how to use it anymore and that just becomes a huge issue and also that is one big way to lose customers! I think it is great software. I really need it for my business and for keeping track of everything I would forget.

Cons

I think that at times when I have tried to do the little math tricks using excel I've had some issues with things suddenly freezing or deleting and had to start all over again. I think that there have been some minor bugs in the hassle that have wasted some of my time or had me lose some info, but it is still more reliable than other software I have tried, and I still recommend it.

Pros

I use Excel to prepare monthly accounting reports. I love CSV files! You can pull all kinds of information from your accounting program into a CSV file, remove any unneeded information for your particular report, edit the content and change the formatting to make your reports look exactly how you want them to fairly quickly.

When you have several columns of numbers, you can put a formula in under the first column you want to add. Then copy that "total" cell and select the following columns that you also want to be totaled and paste it into the "total" row for each column at the same time and it automatically adds and inserts the total for each column.

Cons

The different formulas you can add to an Excel report are great and makes it easy to add totals for certain information; however, it is a little difficult to know the correct formulas and how to input them. I would like to have a reference guide listing various formulas and what they are for - the only lists I have found do not explain what each formula does. There could be a reference guide, but I have not found one yet.

Also, when you need to merge some cells and add text to the resulting cell, it would be nice if the cell height would automatically expand and shrink back down as the contents of the cell changes. I usually have to manually change the height, although not always, so there must be some trick to do that which I have not caught on to yet.

Pros

I liked the Microsoft Excel program, that it is flexible and easy to learn and work on. It is an excellent place for making tables and electronic tables that contain simple and complex equations, which makes me able to make a simple accounting program in record time and complete tables and invoices in minutes, and the graphs can be inserted very easily and simply Also, the file contains several pages, and new pages can be added endlessly. The pages can be linked to equations between them easily. When saving the work, it can be saved with several extensions to open it in other programs such as the pdf extension and many great features in the program

Cons

I can assure you that there are no downsides to Microsoft Excel. There was a simple note, which is to change the work format when opening the file with old, previous versions.

Pros

Excel is THE tool for analysts and engineers. While Google Sheets acts as a close competitor, for those of us who need the sophisticated capabilities that Excel provides, there really is no substitute. The ability to automate processes through advanced formulas and macros makes Excel the only solution for those seeking to manage and clean data. Excel has dominated the market for decades and you can rest assured knowing that everyone knows of Excel.

Cons

Mass adoption is a double-edged sword. Despite Excel offering a lot of value to the user, there's very little in terms of substitutes to even consider. If you coworkers, colleagues and clients use Excel, you need it as well if you hope to send them spreadsheets. The Microsoft Suite suffers from a range of technical bugs that seems to get resolved only sporadically. Every time a new version of Excel is released (usually once every few years), some aspect of the user experience ends up changing. To those of us who have ingrained habits in terms of where to find specific buttons or memorizing certain shortcuts, the changes can be frustrating.

Pros

As a financial analyst with 15 years experience, I've been using Microsoft Excel for quite some time. With all the new business intelligence software out there, some may be of the opinion that Excel is becoming obsolete. I would argue that is still has it's place in a today's analyst's toolbox. In our office we have utilized some of the fancier tools like Alteryx or Tableau to wrangle/present data but Excel still remains a major part of our regular processes. Excel offers tremendous flexibility in summarizing, analyzing and presenting data for whatever the deliverable calls for. It also acts as an excellent scratch pad for ad-hoc analysis via filters or pivot tables. What I like most about Excel is the fact that you can directly manipulate your data in an intuitive manner without the need for knowledge of programming or scripting languages. Bottom line, if you are an analyst, spreadsheets will always be part of your world and Excel is the industry standard.

Cons

It's honestly difficult to think of anything that I don't like about Excel as it has served me well for more than a decade and a half in my professional life. I suppose like any other software it can at times be slow to respond when your files get to large. Probably the thing I like least about it is the tendency to get corrupted when too many formatting options are used in a single workbook and/or the tendency to not always allow you to make a clean break when you want to remove a link to another file that another user has created. Other than that, it's pretty solid.

Pros

Microsoft Excel - is one of the most complete and advance spreadsheet application currently on the market. The better question would be, what can't it accomplish as this is an application that is used across the board in many companies and careers. It has an awesome ribbon feature which houses many groups of frequently used tools and is super customizable. I doubt that there is any one person that can house all knowledge about this one application. Just to list a few of what can be done:

* Write basic, intermediate and advance formulas and functions to carry out your day to day work.
* Create basic, intermediate and advance conditional formatting to style your sheet and or highlight specific areas and or thing on the spreadsheet to draw focus.
* You can create your own custom group to house your own list of preferred tools to be available at your finger tips.
* It comes equipped with a quick access toolbar to hold frequently used tools right at the top of the sheet which is super easy to access and is something I use at all times while carrying out my day to day routines.
* I love the clean and improved UI [User Interface] version over version.
* It has collapsible tabs and commands to give you more screen real estate when working on small screen devices and or monitors.
* The Developer option is the go to tab when working with VBA and Marcos.
* It comes equipped with the option to record and or write macros using the VBA editor, allowing you to automate your work flow.

Cons

I am not able to think about a con at the moment with so many pros available.

Pros

I often need to do financial projections as part of my work, as well as organizing lists, information about different events that are being organized, structuring new projects that are being undertaken, and various other calculations that just need to happen in the course of my business, on a day-to-day basis. In other words, its fair to say that I basically "live" in Excel. The thing I love most about this tool is just how much you can do with it, when you take the time to really understand how to use it. Excel is simple enough to use as a place to keep a list of people who are coming to an event organized, and complex enough basically act like a mini database. The flexibility to use a single tool in so many different ways is one of my favorite things about this software.

Cons

Even though I've used this software for many many years, probably a decade or more, and most people regard me as an expert in it, there's still functions and applications of it that I haven't yet mastered. There's so much going on under the hood that it's next to impossible to know absolutely every single function that this piece of software can accomplish for you. Which means that if I'm trying to do something a little bit more complex than my usual activities, and I need to stretch my own limits on what I know how to do with the software, I can often lose an hour or two hunting for how-to guides and videos on the internet to make sure that I get the result I really want. However, once I get it, I've just added another tool to my toolbox that continues to make the software even more powerful. So, all in all, even that is time well spent, in my opinion.

Pros

I like The price because It's very cheap when we compare it to the value.
It's a very powerful program and it helps me to create any kind of spreadsheets and use different kinds of formats and formulas.
It's very useful because it allows me to work with my business data and calculate everything by using just simple and basic math (+,-,×,÷).
I like all Excel capabilities and I like everything from the graphs to the stats, forms, lists, functions, autocorrection...etc.
It helped me to stay organized and to have all my data in one place.
I really love all the tips and tricks on how to use Excel to automate some tasks like using it with UiPath for example.
What I like about Excel is I can turn any simple spreadsheet into a multi-function tool to do some sort of difficult task and this allows me to save a lot of time by managing a huge amount of data.
It allows me to do whatever I want with my data and I can see it as a report or as a graph also, I can remove duplicate names, numbers, emails...etc.
I like the user interface because it's very user friendly and even someone with low knowledge of how the software works can create a spreadsheet.
I love their mobile app because it allows me to read, edit, and even create spreadsheets from scratch.
Microsoft Excel support is great and there's a lot of blog posts, Videos, Tutorials everywhere on how to use Excel and how to apply different formulas and create any kind of spreadsheet...etc.

Cons

It really takes some time to be an Excel expert and you need to learn different formulas and there are so many things to learn.
They can improve the Excel app and add more options to it.

Pros

Microsoft Excel is truly amazing. I have used it for SO many things including the following:
-Creating simple lists or databases
-Utilizing more complex rules and formulas within my data
-Creating a TON of different type of charts and graphs for data analysis and reporting
These are definitely my top three favorite features and capabilities, and those that I use most frequently. In addition, everything can be customized to meet your needs and preferences in Excel as well. Fonts can be changed in size/type/color/style, cells can be highlighted, and charts and graphs can be customized in these same ways as well.

Cons

There is nothing I dislike about Excel, but I know that its capabilities are far beyond my knowledge and ability. It can seem complicated, but once you learn how to utilize all of its features, it can truly be an asset in so many ways. A personal goal of mine is to get some more training in that area so that I can take advantage of this software's capabilities to the full extent.

Pros

It is a very practical spreadsheet that can be used for countless tasks and areas of application such as audits, accounting, finance, mathematics, education, research, among others, which allows to empty data of various types that form a database that can be edit with the use of many formulas from the simplest to the most complex to execute calculations on data that in turn analyzes it to determine particular amounts that give answers to questions, mediating numerical results, graphs, tables, among others. Similarly Excell that the spreadsheet can be customized according to the tastes of who uses it, and according to the end of the information that is expected to meet in order to meet specific needs. It also allows multiple spreadsheets to be handled in a single file, which even gives the tools to connect them together. At the time of printing allows to hide information that is considered not relevant to display, even if the information from a previous spreadsheet is required, it can be copied to another sheet to work on it, leaving the original intact. Another function that is very good that generate database in my case education for student notes, and allows you to create macros to show only a case of particular notes (note of a student) and can even connect with the presentation of student behavior through graphs, without the need to show all the results of the database.
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Cons

Particularly I do not have to object to the use of this tool, the times that I have presented some flaw is because I have not been configured for Windows installations are done automatically, a situation that has been corrected automatically at the end of the update.

Pros

It lets me work on the web version of MS Excel with my peers or coworkers. This means that I and my peers can access the Excel file from anywhere and change it at the same time.
Excel is a great tool for analyzing data because not only can I store our data and do calculations with it, but it also comes with a number of other tools.
Powerful tools for filtering, sorting, and searching help me narrow down the factors I need to think about when making decisions. So, I can play with a huge amount of data in an efficient way.

Cons

If the file is too big, it can slow down the Excel program because the interpreter/compiler has to go through each row and/or column. The easiest way to make sure Excel is time-efficient is to break up the file into smaller files.
For a one-time analysis, Microsoft Excel is a great tool.
The information doesn't go into the spreadsheet. The user has to type in every single bit by hand.

Alternatives Considered

MATLAB

Reasons for Choosing Microsoft Excel

It is not secure enough.

Switched From

RStudio Desktop

Pros

I remember once, many years ago I had a teacher saying that Excel was originally created to augment and support another spreadsheet program. However by the time they finished developing the original version it far out-shined the program it was meant to support. So much so that the other software was dropped entirely in favor of Excel. I don't know how factual this recounting is, but it wouldn't surprise me if it is true.

Excel rocks. I use it all the time for my business. Yes I also have Quick Books and other accounting software. But nothing beats a good ol spreadsheet. I can put all of my numbers in and edit them with an endless amount of formulas.

It is truly mind-boggling the depth of the program too. Sure it can auto-sum columns and sort data by the 3rd letter of someone's name, but it can do much much much more. I once created a program inside of excel to aid in the scanning of bar codes. We had a bar code scanner that would simply dump all scanned data into a single column in excel. Using the built in scripting I created a button that (after dumping the data in) would auto sort the data into it's necessary column and prep the sheet for printing and signatures. Not only that but I set it so that at the push of a button the end user could create the next week, month, or even yearly document at the press of a button.

Also, using O365 you can have multiple people editing the same document simultaneously. This is Huge! No more editing copies of copies.

Cons

I really can't think of any. I suppose how fun it is. I've wasted many many hours creating complex spreadsheets for my simple budget merely because I wanted too.