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

Excel is a versatile spreadsheet application that continues to benefit from its age, the weight and momentum behind it, and the continued focus on it as core Office app. The variety of applications of this application are what continue make it a winner.

Cons

Stemming from the same positive attributes of its age and flexibility are the downsides to its age and flexibility - its overlapping years of feature additions and subtractions to the building more on top of pre-existing structures mean that somethings need to be unpacked in order to work how you'd like them too and the robustness of the product can be daunting. Knowing that you'll never know ALL that it is capable of and that the best way to achieve anything is to picture it and then hunker down for an evening of searching and learning.

Pros

It is easy to use for any project whether you know formulas or not!

Cons

Formulas can be tricky to learn and error messages are not always easy to understand.

Pros

I like the ability to make spreadsheets and it is excellent for record keeping

Cons

Not user friendly and extremely agitating to learn to use.

Pros

I liked many positives about this program, including its ability to adapt to different uses and needs, as well as its effectiveness in transforming data into valuable information through powerful analysis and visualization tools. In addition, this program integrates well with the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem, which enhances productivity and facilitates collaboration, and provides multiple options for protecting files including passwords and specifying access permissions, ensuring the security of sensitive data. Despite its power, it features a relatively simple and easy-to-learn user interface, making it an effective tool for both beginners and professionals.

Cons

Most of the drawbacks of this software can be effectively dealt with through proper training and taking full advantage of its features, or using other software solutions or techniques in case of urgent need.

Pros

I am able to create many spreadsheets for various projects

Cons

Not much really because I have not come across any issues

Pros

Microsoft Excel enables powerful data analysis, visualization, and automation.

Cons

Microsoft Excel can be complex for advanced data analysis.

Pros

It is practical, easy and helps me in the organization of studies and work.

Cons

His organization to make calendars is not very clear and objective.

Pros

Organize reports with functions using visual charts and visual models

Cons

The risk of losing original data arises when there are many versions of one report changes are made and not kept track of.

Pros

I love that it has a lot of features to excel.

Cons

It is a bit hard and time taking for a beginner to learn everything in Excel.

Pros

Excel is a product that we frequently joke about being a “black hole of possibilities.” I’ve found that if I ever think “wouldn’t it be great if you could do XYZ in excel” that it’s probably something that CAN be done. You just have to go through the process of searching and finding out how to do it. We use Excel constantly and so much of our day to day tasks are done within Excel because it’s just the best way to keep track or to analyze data. I don’t know what we would do without such a product at our disposal.

Cons

I don’t know if it can actually be labeled as a con, but when using Excel outside of just needing a few columns here or there or to do basic calculations, it can be difficult to just figure out how to accomplish a needed function. It really is necessary to devote significant time to delving into the functions within the product and to become knowledgeable about the product and it’s many possible functions.

Pros

Excel is full-featured. If you can think of a feature you would want, it probably has it. It may be buried somewhere, but it is there. It is like a powerful sports car in a station wagon body.

Cons

Excel has so many features, it can be difficult to use: All that depth and power leads to incredible complexity. Between the ribbons and the menus, and all of the other user interface "features," it can be like using two or three different programs at once. So many features have been crammed in over the years, it can be hard to figure out what's there and how to get to it. I've helped many beginners with learning Excel, and so much of what is obvious to me is completely opaque to them, and likewise, there are many advanced, number-crunching and heavy-lifting features that I just have no idea about. Most people I work with consider me a super-power-user, and I probably use less than 10% of what Excel can do!

Pros

Calculations and formula interpretation is the major of excel. I worked a lot on data analysis and I used the formula feature frequently. I also like the tutorials and help section in excel. The most feature I like is the Pivot table because it is just an wide level of analysis in a single sheet. Just by putting rows and columns in appropriate way, I can generate a lot of things like revenue, profits, productivity, production data and much more. The Microsoft internal software networking within word, put and excel is too good. The dashboard creation of excel works for me and also speaks for me because it is doing a work of 10 people. I love it.

Cons

My cons are also on formula. I like to have a separate formula section in excel where we are able to see formula which we can used or which are applicable. This update can solve a lot of things automatically without using YouTube.

Alternatives Considered

SAP Analytics Cloud

Reasons for Switching to Microsoft Excel

Because it is world wide acceptable and can be easily modified into a required format. For me, my whole production datas comes in a excel format thus excel is now in my blood .

Pros

Excel is my go-to application for everything from straightforward data sets to more intricate revealing and dashboards. The most significant part of Microsoft Excel is that when I use it consistently for accounting page angles in my business. I love that it is simple and easy to understand in helping me with assembling my rotate tables. I can use the lines and sections effectively where it is not difficult to put any information data effortlessly in a solitary sheet. The wide range of functions it offers might be frustrating at first. However, once you get the hang of it, it becomes one of the most useful software in your life.

Cons

You cannot recover the password for a file once you have lost it. You can't work together (in a group climate) which you can do in Google Sheets. It very well might be difficult to show the condition for an all-encompassing component notwithstanding a few cells that the condition is identifying with if the worksheet is immense.

Pros

The industry standard spreadsheet Excel has made my life much easier. I use Excel at least 3 times a day. From organising my daily schedule, budgets, calorie charts to fulfill my academic errands of simple and complex arithmetic functions.
Excel has proved to be user friendly and is being constantly updated. The versatile functionalities of Excel has simplified even the complex tricky day today tasks. I find it very convenient that the information can be represented graphically, especially when being shared. The filter system in which information can be filtered using numerals, keywords comes very much handy during quick reference. The suggestions with keywords has simplified the use of Excel further and I found myself using it more often - not to mention the accuracy.
Excel can be installed in to your PCs, mac and even your android phones.
My life has become much easier with Microsoft Excel and I love it!

Cons

As much as Excel simplifies complex tasks, understanding certain complex functionalites of Excel is a great challenge.
I've messed up big time when it comes to dragging formulas over to a set of data or when copy pasting.
Further printing a spread sheet is very difficult, considering that the cell alignments and margins has to be repeatedly adjusted.
Sharing large Excel files is a challenge, which seems to be a drawback .
Excel should be modified as to being able to reset the password of protected files ; the lack of which is extremely inconvenient.

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

I have been studying science for almost 6 years (my bachelor + my master) and I always need the help of Microsoft Excel when it comes to working with data. The software might not be the easiest when you use it for the first time, but once you understand and learn more of it, you will see how useful it actually is. I do a lot of research projects at my university and I always have to collect data for different purposes and subjects. After the collection of data, I always enter them on an Excel sheet orderly. It is very easy to insert my data into an Excel sheet for further calculation. What I personally think is when your data is too big, Microsoft Excel is the best software to deal with the problem. What I love most about this software is it incredibly saves my time. Because, I do a lot of calculation after having my data sorted on an Excel sheet. Excel does very complicated calculations in a considerably short time period that would probably take me days if I did it manually with my calculator. Last but not least, it enables me to create graphs and diagrams based on what my data shows. It is very helpful to analyze my data and present it clearly.

Cons

What I like least about this software is it is not smart enough to detect the errors that I might have done while entering my data on an Excel sheet. Especially it sucks when the software does automatic calculations with my data and since there might be some errors, I might end up with an incorrect result (e.g., graphs, diagrams) that is unacceptable in the case of science. I would also argue that automatic graph suggestion by the software (assumed based on my data) is not always correct. Sometimes I am suggested a diagram, for example, that does not make sense at all. I personally think Excel's ability to create graphics and diagrams is less accurate than the other software like R programming language.

Pros

Excel is accepted as industry standard for many. It is familiar, accessible and a diverse and powerful tool in and out of the workplace. Excel continues to be a valuable asset to our company, it is utilized to support production logs, inventory management, financial documents as well as many other applications.

Cons

Excel is a very powerful tool, there is no disputing that. The primary issue with excel is that it does not propose its most valuable features onto the user. It is obviously ideal to have the tools that are utilized most on the primary tool bars however it often masks the more favorable tools. For instance, excel has a developer tab of which you can use and produce your own macros, expansion packs, etc. This tab has limitless value, but unless the user happens to know about these features or has someone else recommend it to them they ultimately have lost this functionality. Excel also lacks in support documentation for the user. Although documentation exists in an effort to explain tools and functionalities to users, it is simply lacking in useful information. I believe it would be more beneficial if excel would include short videos on how to actually use the tools/extensions with examples.

Pros

For basic tasks this product is intuitive and very easy to use. Easy to learn formulas and simple mathematical equations can turn this basic product into a very powerful tool. You can quickly and easily find the sum or difference between two values. You can find duplicates values in a column or row. You can color code cells, columns, or rows. Excel includes most of the basic text formatting features that Word contains as well. Learning vlookup has changed my life. Learning Pivot Tables has also been a great help.

Cons

There can be a learning curve for some of the more advanced features, such as Pivot Tables or VLookup; having someone around who can help you get started can be very helpful. You have to consider the cost when compared to similar, free products such as Google Sheets. Google Sheets does is not quite as robust but it is free and contains most of the basic functionality as Excel.

Pros

Microsoft Excel allows me to import thousands of rows of marketing data from web analytics software. I can then analyze it to see success metrics such as trend in year-over-year growth in new customers, cases sold, merchandising category such as grocery, etc. This analysis can be done by creating column or bar charts which show both a spike and lift in traffic or conversions during periods when the marketing campaigns ran. So, I can quickly correlate the lift or drop in performance to when the marketing campaigns started and when they ended. I can also use advanced analytics functions such as vLookup or pivot charts to associate email addresses to those customers who didn't purchase so my marketing team can run re-targeting campaigns against them. Or, deduplicate function to remove duplicates and extract a unique set of customer ids and names so I can run business intelligence reports against them.

Cons

Microsoft Excel uses significant ram of a computer when number of rows being analyzes is in thousands. Or, if multiple files of Excel are open simultaneously. In such scenarios, Excel crashes and all open files close. It has to be restarted and not all changes are saved in backup versions of the files. Unless Excel being used is part of the cloud version of Microsoft Office also called Office 360. Similar challenges are faced when using advanced analysis functions like vLookup. When using vLookup against thousands of rows and multiple columns, Excel hogs more ram and slows down cpu so whole system freezes.

Pros

In my opinion, there are 3 main advantages for excel users:

1)Progressed Data Organization :
Dominate has quite possibly the absolute most complete datum association and investigation frameworks for the normal customer. All things considered, it works for most business applications as well. Utilizing the force of your PC, Excel can undoubtedly deal with a great many information recipes and additionally calculations rather consistently. In the event that you have numerous sheets which are interlinked, the equations and information association are unmatched.

2)Underlying Formulas :
Before, Excel had recipes for pretty much every application under the sun. In that capacity, clients quickly fell head over heels for the straightforwardness of the attachment and-play interface as it assisted them with making delightful accounting pages in the blink of an eye. Throughout the long term, Excel has reliably added more implicit recipes as clients have mentioned. Obviously, these recipes are not restrictive, as they are only numerical of configuration, which means these equations could be utilized in other programming stages as well.

3)Outsider Support
Lastly, Excel can work with outsider projects through particular connectors. Since Excel is based on the .NET stage, it coordinates well with nearly whatever is based on a similar stage. Accordingly, admittance to information or potentially other programming stages has expanded massively throughout the lon

Cons

Despite these advantages, there are 3 major desadvantages

1)Steep Expectation to learn and adapt :
Excel is a genuinely muddled framework. To utilize it productively, you must have the option to explore through the UI which is considerably more convoluted than in its unique plan. In past plans, clients had the option to simply point and click and assembled lovely bookkeeping pages. In any case, Microsoft has added a plenty of provisions throughout the long term that now I must be gotten to through different scenes or potentially dropdowns. Doing this has made a smidgen of disarray and even eliminate a few components that individuals were content with.

2)Cost :
Microsoft Office and Dominate had never been free, however the cost was significantly more sensible before. As Microsoft has kept on investing huge loads of time and energy into their Office suite, the expenses have risen significantly. Before, you could buy the product for as modest as $19.95 each year; that essentially isn't the case any longer. Presently, the expense can undoubtedly overshadow $45.99 each year for a downloadable duplicate and $99.99 for a cloud-based contribution. While this isn't heinous, it is cost-restrictive for an office brimming with PCs.

Restricted Joint effort:
Completing out the impediments for Dominate, it's anything but a community oriented framework (essentially not innately). Microsoft w

Pros

MS Excel is one of the most important tools I deal with on a daily basis and I can never do without it. In fact, I cannot list all the things I love about MS Excel, as the numbers that are entered into the cells on the page, enable you to perform many, many arithmetic operations and create graphs of various kinds. I like the smoothness with which all of this is done, so that data is entered easily, tables are prepared and formatted, and the required calculations are performed, as well as preparing it all for printing or sharing. I like how it integrates with most applications and how it gives you multiple options to save that data so that you can export it to the application you need. I also like the formatting options for graphs so that you can form the desired graphic as you wish, I also like the copy and paste options with the rest of the Office programs, and also the multiple paste options, which can be an image, so that it is easy to insert and coordinate with the rest of the content on the Word page, for example. As for the calculations, it is almost inclusive of everything, from the simple to the complex. Add to this the many videos and educational materials that Microsoft provides to enable users to achieve a greater understanding of how to perform these operations correctly.

Cons

Nothing is mentioned at all, as everything related to numbers, arithmetic operations and their related matters is available in MS Excel, and you cannot find a tool that can compete with it or be able to achieve the same quality of services that you get with MS Excel.

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

There are so many things I live about Microsoft Excel. It is very intuitive in many cases and even makes "suggestions" on some of my tasks. I use Excel is multiple situations, and not just for number crunching as some people might think. Excel is my favorite software for charts and numerical reports, but I also love it for creating logs, lists, forms, graphs, and the list goes on. Microsoft Excel is very good with imported data, like files from software that uses Crystal Reports or similar applications. Excel is also good for creating and manipulating .csv files to export into other applications. I'm not an expert user, but the formulas in Excel are works of art. I can create a decent formula to yield specific information, however I often don't have to do so. Excel has a library of formulas from the simple to the impossible, and everything in between. I like that for simple formulas, I don't have to recreate the wheel - there is already a template for that. When I have trouble working out a formula in my head, there is likely a formula already existing in Excel that will produce the desire result. And when I have something super complicated, or it needs to reference multiple pieces of data on multiple tabs, Excel easily follows the formula to get the exact data needed.

Cons

My least favorite feature of Microsoft Excel is also my most favorite. For all its flexibility and multiple uses, Excel is a very rigid software. By that, I mean that any data introduced into the software that does not fit into very strict parameters (which are admittedly quite expansive), Excel is unable to accommodate or render the expected information. That is true of many programs to some extent, however, Excel's limitations are a bit more noticeable than other software. That said, there are almost always work-arounds to achieve the desired result.

Pros

It is extremely powerful, fast and reliable software for medium to large scale financial reporting. My personal experience with this software is a testimony of this statement. I have worked for years in (large scale) financial reporting, the position is called financial controller of car manufacturer which produces 500,000 cars per year. Our financial reporting software for the past 5 years has been MS Excel and to give you an idea of the scale, we use very large spreadsheets (100 sheets, with a couple of thousand used rows and hundreds of columns, linked to 30-40 files with a large VBA codes in them) we even had to migrate from .xlsm to .xlsb to speed up the process. We've integrated it with SAP (ERP software) and work flawlessly and fast, we have even developed our own MS Excel in house Add-ons.
It is easy to track errors and formulas, you can combine Boolean conditions easily with the use of sum-product, lookup and indexing functions, it even has an optimisation solver embedded (simplex, non-linear and integer). The regression tools are at the level of specific data analysis software.
But the best part of it is that many people have MS Excel installed in their computer which makes it extremely convenient and easy to share with anyone. I can only tell that by far is the best software (in general) I've ever used. I simply love it (as you can tell).
Disclaimer: I've no longer work as a controller, I've moved to research and I still used it every day.

Cons

When you are moving the same file in different devices with different display resolutions, sometimes it gets a bit messy with graphs losing their proportions. Also a big drawback of some of their online and mobile device versions is that those are not very well integrated with "complex" VBA code.