It's no longer enough for Microsoft to add the odd new feature and scrub up the appearance of an app: the world has moved on, not least in that we now call them all "apps" instead of "applications." With Office 2016 now available to Office 365 users (if their companies have enabled it, or if they sign up themselves), our attention did go first to the
new version of Microsoft Word. Office for Mac really contains four major applications (and OneNote, which we'll call a minor one) though, and while we personally might lump PowerPoint and Outlook together into the guest-cast category, Microsoft Excel 2016 15.11.2 is definitely a star of the show.
It's just not significantly updated, or at least not in terms of new features. There are some, they are all small, and the overwhelming change from Excel 2011 is that it looks better and is more Mac-centric -- things like Retina display support and a proper Full Screen Mode that are also found in the other Office apps. If we're sounding a bit snippy, it's because we'd expect to be if you told us this, yet in practice, in actually using the app, the tiny visible changes turn out to be rather excellent.
Smallest of the small
Perhaps the tiniest change turns out to be the most noticeable -- and also hardest to describe. Clicking on a particular cell or dragging to select a range feels and looks subtly different. You do what you always did, and you end up with exactly what you wanted, but along the way Excel 2016 is snappier. Jazzier.
It sometimes seems as if the selection is a beat behind where you're dragging, yet it also always feels so very sharp and responsive. Any change to something you do 100,000 times a day is going to be striking, and this one a strangely both unsettling and rather appealing. There's definite a sense of get-on-with-it, that Excel is ready to work hard.
That said, it's seemingly doing a lot of work behind the scenes. With Excel open and only a blank sheet on the screen, the software takes enough resources that it introduced a stuttering to iTunes movie playback. We're not concerned about this for itself, as if you're going to watch a film over your lunch hour, you should just quit Excel and remember that it's healthier to step away for a minute.
If you use Excel to anything approaching its capacity, you're likely to be in a job where this is your primary, or even sole, tool. So you're not very likely to be bouncing between 10 different apps every minute, but maybe this says more about iTunes than it does Excel. Still, such a visible issue with exactly nothing on the spreadsheet is a little troubling.
Once you're in Excel and working away, it feels quick at entering data and doing the spreadsheet's usual clever way of expanding lists so that if you write 1 in a cell then 2 in the next, a drag across the next rows or columns will see Excel automatically adding in 3, 4, 5 and so on. Usually when you're doing that, you're setting up a spreadsheet for later and you just want it done, you have no thinking to do about it, so the speed here is welcome.
Of course it is. It's
speed. This version of Excel feels snappier, more nippy than Excel 2011. That version now feels remarkably old in comparison, but then it is five years since it came out, so it
is old. If the only improvements in Excel were these cosmetic ones, we'd still recommend upgrading, because alongside the nicer look comes an apparent speed increase.
Windows users need our help
It's not the case that the only improvements are cosmetic, but actually there are no alterations that will make you need to sit down and have a strong cup of tea. There are ones that might make you raise a glass if you happened to already have one in your hand, such as the fact that pressing control-c now does the same thing as command-c (that is to say, both the "Windows" shortcuts
as well as the standard Mac keyboard commands work on the Mac). You're not paralyzed in shock yet, but it's one of those small things that makes it easier for people to switch back and forth between the Mac and PC: Windows users can just carry on using their familiar keystrokes for copy, paste, save, and so on.
That is a bit of a clue to how Microsoft sees Excel: it is helping out Windows people who have to suffer switching to Macs, the poor things. There is not, and there cannot be, an equivalent the other way around: Mac Excel users have to learn to abandon the command key in favor of control when they go to a PC. Mind you, not to be snarky about this, but how many intense Excel users do switch back and forth between Windows and Macs? There are still enough Windows-only features in Excel to keep certain people on that platform, and we'd tell you what they were if we could understand them.
Reportedly charts are one readily comprehensible difference: the latest version of Office for Windows, released in 2013, still has superior charts to Office 2016 for Mac. That said, though, 2016 has seen the Mac get one of Windows Excel's niceties: a recommended chart option. Rather than stepping through all the different types of charts in the world or, heaven forbid, knowing what you want, you can just click a single button. Excel has already analyzed your data and chose what it thinks is the best visual representation of it.
While we suspect Mac Excel users will stay on Macs, and Windows ones will stay on PCs, we are utterly certain that actual spreadsheet documents will be copied back and forth between the two. So certain that we expected to find the age-old problem of an incompatibility. It isn't really age-old, in that it's not something we've had since the Jurassic Period, but it is something we've had for three decades. Excel calculates all its dates by converting them into the number of days since a specific point in time. On Windows, that specific point is January 1, 1900. So Excel might show next Christmas Day as 12/25/15, but internally it's calling that day number 42,361.
Fine, but on a Mac, "day zero" is January 1, 1904, so the same 12/25/15 is seen internally as day number 40,901. That's a difference of 1,406 which just might, might have a teeny bit of an impact on some of your calculations.
Now, for the longest time, Excel has coped with this by warning you when you open a spreadsheet from the other platform. What it didn't do was twig that you can copy and paste dates from one spreadsheet to another. So if someone ignores the warning, for instance because they know they're only opening the sheet for a moment and will be sending it right back to a Windows user, then they can well have two spreadsheets open with different date systems. Excel actually handles that fine -- unless you copy a date out of one spreadsheet and paste it into the other. Or rather, it used to be a problem: now if you try to do it then you get the same warning you do on opening such an alien spreadsheet.
Microsoftian touches
There are other touches that are less great and more what you would expect from Microsoft. Like Word, Excel has a Ribbon toolset that in theory is better and easier to use than old-fashioned menus, and like Word, that's nearer to being true this time. It's still the case that Microsoft says every tool you need is right in front of you at the moment you need it, and otherwise is kept out of your way, but maybe we just have a mental block on this. With Word we got confused over where to find cross-references; with Excel, it's charts. They're under the Insert tab of controls, but we kept clicking on Data instead, and when that failed, we clicked Review, View, Home, and Page Layout before we finally found it.
Then, more than even Word, Excel does really want you to either sign in to OneDrive, or sign up for it. At first it presses for this to the point of being annoying, but does eventually get the hint. Some would argue that they'd like a Dropbox connection option, but we used Excel 2016 saving our files to our local Dropbox folder, which had the same effect, and that was all we needed.
To get it or not
We don't need a built-in Dropbox connection, and we don't really need a single one of the new improvements in Microsoft Excel 2016. Despite that, we're recommending you get it. We're recommending it highly, and in fact with much more confidence than we do Word 2016. Both have striking new appearances, and while that shouldn't be all that vital, it is. Excel is not something you use lightly, it is an application one tends to spend all day in if one uses it much at all, and tiny things that make it faster and more pleasant to use add up enormously.
We've always had a bit of a soft spot for Microsoft Excel. Maybe it's because we used to live more in Word, and so became excruciatingly familiar with its problems, but through the years it's felt as if Excel was "the good one." It's also felt that PowerPoint was the rubbish one, but that's another issue.
Microsoft Excel has the same cost and requirements as Word, since they are both part of Office 2016. That means they require an Office 365 subscription and are included for free in the price for that. The subscription cost varies, but starts from $7 per month. See the
official site for details.
There will also be a version you can just buy and install, rather than subscribe to, and that will be available some time in September, but there are no pricing details yet. There is no option to buy just the Office applications you actually use, as you can with Apple's vaguely Excel-ish spreadsheet program Numbers; you buy all of Office or nothing. The Office 365 subscription you get includes generous OneDrive space, support, updates and a few other minor niceties.
Who is Microsoft Excel for:
If you're already regularly using Excel, then your real question is whether you get it via Office 365 now, or wait until September. There is no question but that you should get it. Equally, if you're in the market for a world-class spreadsheet application, then as good as Numbers is, Excel has it beat.
Who is Microsoft Excel not for:
Don't get this to total up the scores from your local Little League matches. This is for business, and consequently is both powerful and requires some work get to know it.
-- William Gallagher (
@WGallagher)
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