About Microsoft Excel








Microsoft Excel pricing
Microsoft Excel has a free version and does not offer a free trial. Microsoft Excel paid version starts at US$6.00/month.
Alternatives to Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Excel Reviews
Feature rating

- Industry: Nonprofit Organization Management
- Company size: 51–200 Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
The industry standard
Honestly, I love Excel. The truth is, once you unlock the various features there is very little you can't do. For fun I've created a dynamic resume', a slide presentation and even a couple of games inside Excel just to see if I could.
Pros
Excel's greatest value is its ability to be many things for many people. I would say 90% of the people I've seen use Excel only use about 10% of its capabilities, and it's great for that. People are making quick budgets, schedules, to-do lists and even recipes books with excel and don't need many "pro" features for that.
Then there are the people who use it for contact management and data-processing, I've even seen an Excel instance that used extensive scripting to handle CRM, inventory and mail-merge marketing. I don't suggest it, but if you really want to get into it, it's very possible.
I'd say the greatest advantage of using Excel is that it's the industry standard for spreadsheets. If send someone an excel sheet you can bet that they will have a way to open it.
Cons
For cons, it does annoy me a bit that the Mac version isn't nearly as good as the Windows version. It's not surprising, of course, but it is annoying. I use Excel on different platforms and operating systems and the difference is striking.
Also, if you do plan on getting in the weeds with excel for business intelligence and data processing, you can literally spend years studying ti and getting proficient with the all of the capabilities.
And finally, it can be a huge processor hog and slow down everything else on your computer if you aren't careful. Even a simple spreadsheet with a simple formula involving whole columns can suddenly bring a stop to your workday.

- Industry: Retail
- Company size: 11–50 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Spreadsheet Data Management & Analytics
It is great for simple data and quick data filtering. It can quickly fix issues if you are using it for inventory editing and can come in handy for stand alone projects. If you add a lot of different equations in it or use it for larger data, it can become a pain using it. Since it is program on your computer and not cloud based, it can out perform tasks that competitors would struggle with that are cloud based.
Pros
This software is a company standard use for a lot of other programs. It can filter data, create .csv files for upload and download of data, and handles equations to help with data analytics. There are a lot of guides on this program online if you are struggling with a problem and there are plugins that you can use to help make your job faster. Many companies have this as a standard so sending files to others is usually not a problem.
Cons
It is not meant to be used as a database for large data. It can lag out after you get to 60K lines of data. The biggest issue I have with this program is that it likes to convert large number text to scientific notation and you have to constantly do workarounds to prevent it from happening. It has some minor glitches if you have too many different files open at the same time. It is not the greatest with group collaboration because the files are meant to be used as one user at a time. You have to also manually save your files from time to time as you are working. Although you can often times get your file back if it wasn't saved and the program shuts off, it still is a practice you have to get into a habit of doing.
Reasons for Switching to Microsoft Excel
Excel has a longer standing in managing data through sheets. Often times, I would switch between Google Sheets for other projects that require group collaboration. The fact that it is not cloud based and some other program integrations require it makes it difficult to fully get rid of.- Industry: Information Technology & Services
- Company size: 10,000+ Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Excellence of Excel
As for ease of use, Excel has a relatively intuitive interface, but some of the more advanced features can take some time to learn. However, Microsoft provides many resources, such as online tutorials and help documentation, to make it easier to learn and use Excel effectively. Additionally, there are many online communities where users can share tips and best practices for using Excel.Using excel macro we automated many tasks.
Pros
Excel has a wide range of built-in formulas and functions that can perform complex calculations, manipulate text and dates, and more.Excel makes it easy to create professional-looking charts and graphs to help visualize data and trends.Macros can automate repetitive tasks and save time, especially when working with large datasets.
Cons
Excel can become slow and cumbersome when dealing with large amounts of data. This can make it difficult to work with extremely large datasets or to build complex models that require significant computational resources.

- Industry: Law Practice
- Company size: 5,001–10,000 Employees
- Used Weekly for 2+ years
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Review Source
Well, it's an option
A tolerant level of frustration, like accepting your parents or siblings because they're your only family, but they irritate you to no end. It's there and it's all you got because Google cloud apps are blocked by your law firm.
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.
- Industry: Wholesale
- Company size: 2–10 Employees
- Used Daily for 2+ years
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Review Source
Power Excel
Excel is powerful! For the basic function, it is very easy to use. For the advance features, of course, it requires a learning curve.
Pros
Excel is very powerful, we used Excel for the following purpose1) Quote log, log in all the quote information and share among sales. As long as the file is saved in the server ( a share folder that the whole team has access), this can function as the free collaboration tool. 2) Project tracker, we have a template created to track the status and schedule, easy to use. 3) Inventory report, we have formular created and import our monthly sales and stock data to calculate how much more inventory we need to increase. 4) Product flyer with table. We even create a product flyer with excel, especially when there is a table needed in the flyer.
Cons
Unlike word, every page you can set up a different format, the excel has the same format applied to all the pages on the same tab. When creating a product flyer with 2 different styles tabulation, it made us to create two tabs.