Excel

Kommentare: I use Excel daily for my job. Over the last year as I have learned things like vlookup, pivot tables, and how to set up various formulas, it has gone from a spreadsheet program to a powerful tool.

Vorteile: 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.

Nachteile: 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.

Kommentare: Excel is part and parcel of any job that involves computers. I use it for keeping data and automating calculations. I usually get asked for help by other departments and I provide solutions to their problems. Excel greatly enhances productivity and provides a wide array of tools to work with data. It's a pleasurable experience and a very rewarding one at that.

Vorteile: The plain raw power of Excel is simply overwhelming. It is a tool which is universally used in all departments and that is for a good reason. From making simple calculations to creating amazing dashboards with multimedia content and tens, if not hundreds, of complex calculations happening at the same time in the background. Excel is the ultimate power tool. It's library of functions is exhaustive, and even if it doesn't offer a certain function - it allows you to create it yourself. My favorite thing about Excel is VBA. VBA allows you to insert ActiveX controls into your forms, create custom functions and write macros to automate your manual labor and save your precious time. Excel never ceases to amaze me with it's sheer amount of functionality.

Nachteile: Excel having an overwhelming amount of tools is also it's biggest con, as the learning curve is so high and steep - it might discourage some people from diving deeper and discovering it's wonders. Since it's been around for so long, some of it's older features like open database connectivity wizard is outdated and looks straight out of 1999. VBA user interface is also old and since it's such a big part of Excel workflow - it'd be nice to have a better UI.

Kommentare: I have been using Excel since 1995, coming off of Lotus 1,2,3. Each release of Excel has improved its functionality. It’s not only a data organizer, it’s got the ability to turn into a database that’s even easier than Access. As a freelancer, I must keep lots of data. And it’s important to me to see how this data is making an impact in my business. With Excel, I can be my own data analyst and bookkeeper, and I can make gorgeous graphs to add to presentations that would make any CEO proud. Excel, you truly are my partner in business.

Vorteile: Excel has been my all time favorite piece of software for entering, storing, sorting, calculating, tracking and organizing every piece of important data I’ve had to work with. This data organizer and analyzer gives you the functions and features to take important data, be it my client list or the amount of money I charged and organize this data in any way I need. It utilizes complicated statistical formulas with a click. It graphs the data in any type of graph, and it is the ultimate business tool for any and all businesses. This is how I track who owes me what. This is how I keep track of how many more clients I have this year than last. This allows me to present the data in a way everyone will understand. I have been using Excel since it’s inception in Windows 95 and each new release only gets better.

Nachteile: There isn’t anything I don’t love about Excel. When I started using it in 1995, you used to have to memorize the formulas and that took time. Now, everything is one click away. Somehow, I do miss the days of actually using my own logic to calculate things. But boy, it sure saves me a lot of time now!!

Kommentare: With such a versatile software, there are definitely areas of possible improvement. The good side is that Excel is not hampered by these tiny blips; it definitely is possible to work around these limitations and annoyances quite easily. I will say that I find some of the features to be less intuitive than other spreadsheets, but the customization abilities and integration of Excel into popular software modes can't be beat.

Vorteile: This is a must have spreadsheet software; it's used everywhere for a reason. From making simple charts to making sortable lists, everyone from temporary summer students at the office all the way to the IT department all use Excel for their various needs. The built in functions allow for basic "automation" of different calculations so that you don't have to do it by hand. More advanced users can design macros in VB to integrate advanced functions and forms into the spreadsheet. It also copies and pastes into different Microsoft applications like powerpoint and word for seamless coordination between programs.

Nachteile: There are so many different functions that it can be overwhelming to orient someone at first. However, it is easy to use the simple functions of the software immediately; it's just the advanced functions that take time. The problem that I always have is resizing rows or columns - you can input a numerical size, but it means absolutely nothing - I don't know what the units are, whether it's pixels, or just some arbitrary size. Additionally, the automatic formatting is awful, especially when it comes to inputting ratios in the format X:X. Excel converts them to completely unreadable jibberish, and even when I reformat the cells to be text, the next person I send it to often has the same issue - they'll see jibberish like 010542349080398 instead of the ratio that was input.

Kommentare: Excel is the swiss army knife and can be used in small and large companies to tackle many many different problems. The most important warning might to to use it more for analisying data than storing it, since it might be difficult to reuse those data stored in Excel spreadsheet. Corporate data better be stored in relational database. Excel can also be a great tool for sharing reports to management, allowing them to explore it in an easy way with filters and pivot tables, as well as automating some tasks for line employee.

Vorteile: Microsoft Excel is so widespread that reviewing it might seem ludicrous, but I think it is worth sharing my two cents about it and what are its strengths and weaknesses.
Excel is the swiss army knife in any office for dealing with tables and data, not just numbers but also long lists of data coming from the corporate databases. Here lies one if its greatest strenghts: importing data from many formats, by text files or connecting to the databases themselves or, now in the more recent versions, directly from a web page or web table.
Importing, cleaning, formatting, filtering large if not huge tables of data is very handy in Excel, whether they come in plain text format or from the web or a relational database you have the proper rights to connect.
Another area Excel is great at, is also precisely formatting and printing forms with data entry fields an formulas, like printing invoices or receipts. Storing those data entered in the form in a meaningful way though, is not so easy nor straigthforward and requires some programming knowledge.
Excel can be easily enriched with macros or Visual Basic code to perform repetitive actions and tasks, although that might require learning some basics of Visual Basic for Applications that is the version of VB embedded in every Microsoft Office application.
Data analisys with pivot tables is another strength in Excel: it might require a little time to master it for people with no data analisys background, but with little effort it pays off.

Nachteile: Microsoft Excel is quite an old application, it is well maintained and renewed constantly by Microsoft, both in look and feel and in features. Some less used features, like connecting to a database or data analysis wizards seems to be outdated. Formula debugging features seems to never have been revamped and although feature rich, they can be improved for ease of use.