A new face for spreadsheets
Feature for feature, Microsoft Excel for the PC
bests Lotus’s 1-2-3 on power and meets it on price – at $495
Will this newcomer push 1-2-3 back to number two?
Microsoft Excel, the new spreadsheet program from Microsoft Corp., could be
one of those milestone programs that change the way we use computers. Not
only does Excel have a real chance of giving 1-2-3 its most
serious competition since Lotus Development Corp. introduced that program in
1982, it could finally give the graphics interface a respectable home in
the starched-shirt world of DOS.
| Behind the Microsoft Excel control panel that lets you choose screen colors is a spreadsheet that illustrates your ability to adjust the height of rows and show cell contents in color. |
Excel is unquestionably the most powerful PC spreadsheet you can buy. Its
graphics interface is a charmer. And Microsoft has the muscle and determination
to move markets. At $495, Excel’s list price is the same as
that 1-2-3’s. If Excel fails, it will be because 1-2-3
is so deeply dug in nobody can bounce it out – and because not enough people
are willing to buy the hardware it takes to run Excel.
Microsoft clearly had its finger on the pulse of PC technology when it
developed Excel. The program glitters when run on new, fast, powerful
systems. But users who run it on anything less than an 80386 may consider
Excel’s reliance on state-of-the-art hardware a liability. Excel will
run on an AT but, being a graphics-based program, it’s slower than other
spreadsheets. It will work on a regular CGA monitor, but you can’t
really appreciate its fine use of color without EGA. And Excel
consumes so much RAM, that you’ll need expanded memory to run models bigger than
180 bytes. Excel’s future is really linked to how quickly users
become enamored of and ready to invest in the newer, more powerful systems.
Flashy looks
For people who cut their teeth on 1-2-3 and have never
played with a Mac, Excel looks more like a video game than a serious
spreadsheet. It comes with a run-time version of Microsoft Windows, so
it has cheery colors, scroll bars, icons, and menu bars. But users will
soon discover the beauty of Windows. Since it treats the whole screen as
graphics, you can have different spreadsheets and charts in different parts of
the screen and you can change nearly everything about the way anything looks.
Fact file
Microsoft Excel
Microsoft Corp.
16011 NE 36th Way
Redmond, WA 98073-9717
(206) 882-8080
List Price: $495
Requires: AT or 386-based PC, 640 K RAM, hard disk,
color/graphics monitor, DOS 3.0 or later, EGA, expanded memory, and
mouse recommended.
In Short: A powerful, full-featured, graphics-interface
spreadsheet that could seriously threaten 1-2-3. Not copy
protected.
Circle 666 on reader service card.
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If you want to draw attention to a number, you can write it in boldface,
italics, or large type. You can change its color or font style, underline it,
put a shaded background behind it, or draw a border around it. You can make
Excel display negative numbers and zeros in special colors. You can adjust
column widths and row heights in extremely small degrees. If you like, you
can turn off the whole row-and-column grid or paint it any of eight different
colors. You can even change the colors of menu bars, window borders, and
scroll bars. And if you think all that graphics interface paraphernalia
clutters the screen, you can get rid of most of it.
You perform most of this magic by choosing items from Mac-style pull-down menus
and dialog boxes. This is the interface the mouse was made for, but you can
use Excel without a mouse. There are plenty of shortcut keyboard
commands, either to open menus or to go straight to the choice you want. Excel
uses all the function keys for this – in combination with both the
Shift key and Ctrl-Shift – as well as obscure combinations like
Ctrl-Shift-Spacebar. Even veteran mouse users will find some of these combination key
commands handy, though they won’t have to learn as many of them.
Essential functions
Excel is stuffed with features. It has 131 built-in
functions – 41 more than 1-2-3 – including little gems like fact(), which
gives the factorial of a reference, and product(), which multiplies all
references by each other. If these 131 aren’t enough, you can design your
own functions by writing special macros. In all cases, when you need to enter
a function, you can call up a list of them, in alphabetical order, and paste
them right into the spreadsheet. You simply click the mouse on the edit menu
to bring up the selection of Paste functions available to you. Click on the one you
want and the function appears in the edit line of the spreadsheet. This is
a handy feature that both reminds you of proper syntax and eliminates typos.
Display formats are just as versatile. Excel gives you 21 standard formats
and lets you design more. Telephone format, for example, might add
parentheses, spaces, and hyphens, while you entered only numbers. Lira format
(or US Budget format) could throw away the last nine digits and display all numbers
in billions. You can choose any characters, in any color, as prefixes or
suffixes to numbers. To design your own display formats, you can either edit
a standard format line or write a string to indicate an entirely new format.
A wonderful gift to the user is the Undo command. This feature alone is
practically worth the purchase price. A related command saves time by repeating
the most recent command.
Other nice touches make it easy to build spreadsheets. If you want to
enter the same or similar formulas in every cell within a group, you can do
it at a single stroke. Highlight the cells, write the formula, and hit
Ctrl-Enter instead of Enter. Relative references are adjusted and absolute
references stay absolute. The Copy command also comes with nifty options.
You can add the source range to the destination range (or subtract, multiply,
or divide) or copy only values or formats.
| When you define a range as a database, Excel automatically uses column headings as field names in the database. The contents of the cells become the entries. |
Still another excellent feature lets you edit long cell entries in their
entirety. Most other spreadsheets force a string off one edge of the screen if
it gets longer than a single line. In Excel, the editing window automatically
grows, one row at a time, to hold giant formulas.
Cell naming is especially well done. If you have data with labels down the left
column and along the top row, you can highlight the whole matrix and name
every cell in it. Each cell at an intersection of a column and row gets
a unique name, such as March Expenses. You can use these names in formulas
and, as with functions, when you need them you can paste them into your
spreadsheet from a list.
Excel can build little databases almost exactly the same way 1-2-3
does, with records strung out in single rows. You manipulate them with criteria
ranges, extract ranges, sort keys, and so on. A handy advance over 1-2-3,
though, lets you enter data into pop-up windows that look like labeled forms
so that you don’t have to type in new records row by row.
For sophisticated applications, Excel gives you array math. This means that
with a single formula you can multiply one group of cells by another group
of cells and add up the results. In other spreadsheets, an operation like this
would take a great many different formulas.
If you need to do consolidations, Excel lets you write formulas that refer
to cells in other spreadsheets. A nasty kink in this
feature, though, is that if a formula refers to more than one external
spreadsheet, all the spreadsheets have to be in memory. You’d usually want
to do consolidations only because you had a lot of different spreadsheets. Unless
you had loads of expanded memory, your roll-up model might not fit in RAM.
If you do have huge spreadsheets, though, Excel takes the agony out
of lengthy recalculations. Instead of stupidly grinding its way through the
whole sheet recalculating everything, Excel updates only formulas
affected by the latest changes. Just as helpfully, Excel doesn’t
freeze your machine while it’s recalculating; start typing and you’re
back in control. Excel starts recalculating again once you’re finished.
Auditing tools
Excel gives you a whole bagful of tricks to keep
bugs out of your spreadsheets. For example, you can attach notes to any
cell, explaining the reasoning behind a value or formula – a feature that
you can add to 1-2-3 by buying one of the cell notation add-in products on
the market (See “Scratch Pads and Annotators: TSR Notes to Yourself.”)
Another wonderful feature lets you find all the cells that depend on
a particular reference, or all the cells the reference depends on. You
can get a list by cell address, or if you like, Excel will highlight
cells right in your worksheet. If you find you've made a consistent reference
error, you can fix every occurrence at a stroke by using the search-and-replace
command, which works on formulas as well as labels.
| The edit menu is displayed in this Excel screen, which shows a spreadsheet in the right window and macro script in the left one. |
Another great troubleshooting technique lets you pick a range of cells and
highlight, say, all the formulas, or constants, labels, logical statements,
or error cells. This is a quick way to see whether a label or a constant has
sneaked into a block of cells that is supposed to be all formulas. Even
better, you can check for formulas that don’t fit a pattern. If a whole
range is supposed to multiply the cell to the right by the cell above it, you
can instantly spot an oddball that doesn’t. This is a marvelous way to
check for consistency.
With all these auditing techniques, if you ask Excel to highlight
offending cells, you may want to see more of the worksheet than usual. Excel
has a preview feature, which lets you squeeze your spreadsheet down to
tiny type that is 4, 5, or 6 points in size, instead of the usual 8- to 25-point size
that you usually work with. Of course, the smallest type is much too small to
read, but you can see six normal screenfuls at one time. You can still make use
of all of the normal spreadsheet functions in this bird’s-eye view, which
allows you to examine the overall structure of your spreadsheet.
Even if you’re not thinking about audits or maintainability while you build
your model, you can use the Apply Names command to make things much easier for
anyone who comes later. By giving the key values in your worksheet useful names
like back_orders or tax_rate, you can force every formula in your model to
display names rather than cell references, making your logic much clearer.
The Precision as Displayed option is another great way to reduce errors. It
ensures that if you format your data with two decimal places, that is the value
Excel stores internally – not some 12-decimal-place monstrosity. This
means you never have rounding errors or tables that won’t cross-foot.
If you do make mistakes, Excel has eight different cell error messages to tell
you what you did wrong. #DIV/0 obviously means you tried to divide by zero,
and #NAME? means you used a range name that Excel hasn’t heard of.
Graphing and printing
True to its graphics orientation, Excel lets you
draw lovely charts and graphs. It gives you seven basic types, such as bar,
line, and pie, and 44 different variants on these basic types. You can pick
these different formats from a charting gallery, just as you choose commands
from a menu. You can adjust colors, patterns, labels, and chart titles. If
you want to emphasize a value, you can even draw an arrow to it.
But the best thing about Excel graphs is their intelligence. If you
highlight a data matrix, with labels across the top and down the left-hand
column, Excel understands that the numbers should be data points and
that the labels should run along the two axes of the graph. Excel saves you
time by arranging all this information the way you would arrange it yourself.
You can then add graph titles and other text in the colors and fonts of
your choice. If you want to examine a graph while you work on the spreadsheet
that contains the data, you can squeeze the graph off in a window at the
corner of the screen where it will rescale and redraw itself. As the data
change, the graph changes.
Excel drives most common printers and plotters, and gives you the usual options of
specifying headers and footers, page breaks, titles, and the number of copies.
One of its slickest features lets you preview a print job if you’re not
sure what it’s going to look like on paper. You get a screen image of
the printed page in tiny, unreadable type, but you can pick a spot and zoom in
on it if you need to check the text.
If you have the right hardware, you can print a spreadsheet with just as much
color and style as Excel can use to display it. With a laser printer and
the right font cartridges, you can build a spreadsheet that not only figures
your taxes, but prints out a perfect copy of a 1040 form, complete with lines,
fine print, and shading.
Macros and more
All the power of Excel is at the disposal of what
is clearly the most sophisticated spreadsheet macro language available. Macros stay
in separate macro worksheets, which means you can use the same macros on
any number of different models or even on a series of models in succession.
While they’re running, you can hide macro sheets or reduce them to icons
to keep your programs secure.
For automating simple, repetitive jobs,
you can record keystrokes and mouse clicks directly as macro script. For complex
programming, you can use any of an astonishing 355 commands and statements.
Macros can be set to run at particular times, when you open or close a
file, or when certain data change. They can tell whether a model has
been changed since it was last saved and what subdirectory it came from. You
can even write macros that remap the entire keyboard to the characters –
or macro routines – of your choice.
| Excel makes it easy to transfer data. Here we cut a range from the spreadsheet on the left of the screen and pasted it into the spreadsheet on the lower right. |
If you build custom applications, you can write macros to build menus, help
screens, and dialog boxes that are just as powerful as those that come with
the program. Even when your applications use Excel’s native menus,
if there are certain commands you don’t want users messing with, you can
take them right out of the menus. For virtually bombproof applications, you
can build models that accept data only from dialog boxes.
The macro language is also your gateway to interprogram communication. With Excel
running under Microsoft Windows, Version 2.0, macros can load other Windows
programs and send command sequences to them. At an even deeper level, Excel
can establish two-way communications links with compatible Windows
programs, in a procedure called dynamic data exchange (DDE). With DDE links, Excel
can act either as a client or as a server. Each program has access to
the others’ command primitives and can share memory objects.
As an example of DDE, you could write a macro that tells Excel to load
a communications program at a certain time of day. Excel would then
tell the comm program to dial up an on-line stock quote system and feed
updated quotes to Excel. At certain price points, Excel
could tell the comm program to dial a broker and place an order. DDE is
likely to be at the heart of many multitasking applications running under OS/2.
Finally, in a feature strictly for programmers, the macro language has commands that
let you run FORTRAN and C routines you have written yourself. You can also
use these commands to call routines from the Windows library.
Help, manuals, and tutorials
For users who are not going to write
their own C routines, Excel has the most thorough set of help screens,
manuals, and tutorials I have ever seen. There is an on-line manual that gives
information on any topic, as well as context-sensitive help. You can turn the
mouse pointer into a question mark, move it onto anything on the screen, and
get help on that. There are even special help screens for 1-2-3 users.
If you know how to do something in 1-2-3, the program tells you how
to do it in Excel.
Excel’s on-line tutorial and reference manuals are excellent. The
tutorial gently coaxes you through realistic Excel sessions, and the
manuals are clear and well organized.
Instant hit?
What could keep Excel from becoming an instant hit?
Two things. The first is Excel’s hunger for hardware. Graphics-based
programs are naturally slower than character-based programs, so Excel is
a sloth on a regular 8088-based PC. It runs all right on an AT but doesn’t
really get frisky unless you move up to an 80386. Even then, it doesn’t
have 1-2-3’s satisfying snap. Also, though you can run Excel
with a regular CGA monitor, anything less than an EGA is ugly. Finally, Excel
is a RAM hog; you’ll need expanded memory to run models bigger than 180K.
| The preformatted line chart type in reverse video has been selected as the format for the active chart. In the background are different Excel charts, all displaying the same data. |
Feature for feature, Excel is far better than 1-2-3. Excel
can read 1-2-3 worksheets and translate 1-2-3 macros. Its
special help for 1-2-3 users should make it easy to make the switch. Even
so, many Lotus jockeys would rather fight than switch-and many of them
have 4.77-MHz mono PCs that couldn’t run Excel anyway. Besides,
Lotus is working on Release 3.0 of 1-2-3 right now. Though it won’t
be graphics based, Lotus has time to copy some of Excel’s best features.
All the same, Excel is just too good not to have a fighting chance. At
the very least, it should put the fear of God into Lotus Development Corp., and
we’ll all benefit from that. And once people realize there are alternatives
to 1-2-3, they might consider some of the other fine programs now
available. (See “Challenging 1-2-3 on Price and Power,” PC Magazine,
Volume 6 Number 18.) Spreadsheets have been a one-product market for too long.
Jared Taylor
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