Office 2000 Premium Part I: Word, Excel, and Outlook Excel Is Excellent Douglas Smith
What's New?
Excel 2000, like its Office 2000 brothers and sisters, has an abundance of new features, and some of them really great. It can save and read HTML files while maintaining proprietary file formatting. It can also create documents, save them as HTML, open them again in Excel, and still use other Excel features. Drag and drop table data from the browser directly into a document, and automatically format data in PivotTables. Queries have been improved tremendously, while newly added features make it easy to bring data from the Web directly into spreadsheets for tracking or analysis. Create OLAP PivotTable views against any OLE DB for OLAP providers. It now uses a client/server approach to provide fast access to large server-based data stores. The new Spreadsheet Component moves Excel worksheet models to the browser, providing the ability to analyze data and perform calculations. Also new are Chart Components which provide the ability to perform basic interactive charting within a browser.
Speaking of ease of use, a number of new features and functions allow users to work faster and more effectively. List AutoFill allows extending formatting and formulas in lists, simplifying this common task and allowing for more efficient work. A new See Through View that lightly shades cells instead of using an inverse video selection that hides formatting and text. There are new cursors providing visual cues for possible actions. A new Euro Currency Support displays and handles both the symbol and the three-letter ISO code.
As in Word 2000, the HTML document format is the key to Internet/intranet support and sharing. This allows working with the tools familiar from previous versions and use of everyday functions to create content for a network. When a user chooses HTML as the Excel default file format, functionality will be similar to Excel's .xls file format, but adding the capacity to view spreadsheet data in a Web browser.
What's Good?
Excel 2000 has a remarkable set of tools; a lot has been done to make this product as easy to use as possible and, of course, user friendly. Help has been enhanced to make it easy to get answers quickly, and the color scheme and new icons have given Excel a fresh new look. The menu structure's enhancement keep the features used most readily available, just a mouse click away. One really nice new feature is the ability to fix the application simply by selecting Help | Detect and Repair. This really works well for handling day-to-day errors.
What's Bad?
Now with a program like Excel 2000 there just couldn’t be much to write as negatives, but we did find some things that we didn’t like. One of my biggest love-hate reactions comes from the little fellow they call office assistant. This little paper clip fellow is helpful for someone who has never used Excel, or who needs a refresher from time to time, but for advanced users, it just seems to get in the way, appearing when I don’t want it to. It is easy enough to turn off by going to the help menu and saying hide, the problem is it doesn't stay hidden. A missing feature we'd love to see is a pre-selected default file location as in Word 2000, so we wouldn't have to remember where our files are located and type the path in.
How Does It Stack Up Against The Competition?
Excel by far is the best available, in our opinion. When you take into consideration the worldwide distribution and its great ability to share documents and spreadsheets with users everywhere, the case is even more overwhelming. Excel 2000 does a great job with all types of charts, and graphs and interacts very nicely with the rest of the Office package. Upgrading to the new and improved Excel seems definitely the way to go. With its fresh new look and feel and support of HTML, make the move if you haven't done so yet.
