Excel 4.0 Offers a Smarter Spreadsheet
The latest version of Microsoft’s Excel spreadsheet has finally gotten smart enough to read your mind, at least a little bit.
Here’s an example: When you type the first in a series of common spreadsheet entries, the program automatically completes the logical sequence. For example, type in “1st Quarter” or “2nd Quarter” and the program is smart enough to fill in the rest, which of course in this instance would be “3rd Quarter” and “4th Quarter.” Type in “Jan” or “Feb” and Excel fills in the rest of the months.
This feature, called AutoFill, is just one of a number of changes in Excel 4.0 for IBM-compatible and Macintosh computers. The program is now virtually identical for both kinds of machines, so one set of instruction manuals covers both versions.
Microsoft conducted extensive research on Excel users, finding, for instance, that 25% of the keystrokes people use are to cut, copy or paste information. So a “drag & drop” feature was added, which lets you highlight and move data simply by moving the mouse.
Centering titles is another task that’s been simplified. Instead of guessing where the title should begin, now you just type it in and then drag the mouse across the full width of the area in which the title should be centered. It doesn’t matter if boundaries of empty cells are in the way.
Text can be placed vertically in a cell, either stacked one letter below the last or laid sideways facing right or left. In fact, the program is so versatile that every vestige of a spreadsheet’s traditional row-and-column look can be disguised.
With all the emphasis on text manipulation, it is fortunate that Excel 4.0 now comes with a spelling checker that helps you easily find mistakes in your text.
If you need to create more than one spreadsheet with the same design, AutoFormat can apply predesigned styles to any spreadsheet.
If one of the 14 styles included with the program doesn’t meet your needs, you can create whatever format you desire, which can then be applied with AutoFormat.
Excel 4.0 lets you organize related spreadsheets into a “workbook,” which gives you access to any sheet within the workbook without having to open each spreadsheet file individually. You can give descriptive names, up to 31 characters long, to each spreadsheet in the workbook, making it easier to find a certain one later.
Excel has always offered good chart capabilities, and they have been expanded in version 4.0. There are new chart types, such as “radar” for charting data related to a central point, or “3-D surface” charts that depict data in a topographic format that easily shows broad trends over a large amount of data.
If you have trouble making charts the regular way, Excel 4.0 has something called a ChartWizard, which is a series of interactive screens that take you through the procedure of creating a chart step by step. But I found this aggravating to use, especially when it insisted on compressing the finished chart into some odd and often illegible size to fit my spreadsheet.
The other “wizard” included with the program is meant to help you create cross tabulations of large amounts of data stored on a spreadsheet. It works all right, but the results are not as easy to understand as they would be in a statistics software package, such as SPSS for Windows, which I reviewed here several weeks ago.
Microsoft was mindful that spreadsheets are meant for manipulating numbers and added 140 new calculation functions and 20 new statistical and other math procedures.
It also added something called “Scenario Manager,” which lets you more easily compare the results of different data assumptions. For instance, you could easily figure out what would happen to your profits under various scenarios of suppliers raising their prices.
Printing spreadsheets has always been a pain because they seldom fit properly on standard size pages. I think it should be possible to make it more automatic than Microsoft has done, but I do credit them for at least giving users a lot of options in the print control menu to determine how a large spreadsheet should be divided up to fit on pages.
With all of these new capabilities, it might not be sufficient to merely print spreadsheets. Excel 4.0 allows you to create “slide shows”; automated sequences of on-screen tables and charts, with control over how and when one slide transitions to the next. You can even add sound effects.
