Microsoft Excel Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
EVERYTHING is easy with Excel. You have the options to colour co-ordinate cells, selections, and entire spreadsheets. You can name each sheet for easier clarification. Calculations can be done automatic which is a huge time saver with very large amounts of data. Currency symbols can automatically be added to certain columns, rows, selections. You have the option to use number formatting (to include 1 or 2 numbers after a decimal point for example). You have full control over text formatting (Bold, Italic, colours, fonts, underlines, strike-through etc just like you would from any other Microsoft products such as 'Microsoft Word'. You can add fully custom conditions to cells, selections, rows columns, sheets (If 'X' > 0 then change the cells background colour to red - which highlights negative numbers). And to really put the cherry on the cake... you can go deeper using Visual Basic to create macros for automating many tasks. Seen as Visual Basic is a programming language, you could even stretch to create a login for your spreadsheet (if you know what you are doing). There really is 0 limitations to using Excel.

Cons
There is no options to have a cloud based Excel spreadsheet. If there were, I am pretty sure most businesses would ditch their current software and stick with Excel. Our business has multiple physical shops, so being able to share to document amongst all shops for them to collaborate would be ideal. But unfortunately Excel doesn't have this. Such a shame.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
I have been using the excel for the past 20 years and the most excel features i use on my daily routine are the pivot table, vlook functions, graphs, calculations and it keeps on going. all the monthly salary calculations, deductions, are all compiled into one sheet and its very easy to share the files with password protection facility. i have purchased both home office 365 and for business. very compatible with the microsoft teams. Another feature of excel is the low

Cons
everything in excel is very easy to learn, but only while using Macro and Micro features, i had found a little bit of difficulties. but using the help button itself, the same can be resolved within few minutes. the total features in excel in overwhelming and i feel like that i have been using only less than 20% of the total features of excel.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

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.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 5/10

Pros
I love the versatility, look and ergonomics of Excel. The wide formulas and small assistance tools, which make it unnecessary to do certain things manually. Example, if you copy / paste / move formulas and references, it almost always manages to adjust and correct.

Cons
In years of excel the most terrible thing that ever and continues to have is poor support for CSV files. In LibreOffice, for example, when opening a CSV, it tries to detect the conventions and display for you to confirm. Excel has a persistent bug with this, and it almost never manages to open CSV correctly (regardless of whether you use a semicolon, comma or other), the best way to use this is to open CSV in LibreOffice, copy and paste in Excel , which is very annoying. At the office level, it is also bad to be forced to install all the applications in the package, even if you only want excel and a few others.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10

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!

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 8/10