Full Review: Microsoft Excel 2002
By Lori Grunin ZDNet Reviews
Though there's not a lot to write home about in the latest update of Excel, unlike with the rest of the Office XP suite we did find a few new features and enhancements that could make this a must-have upgrade for power users.
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The improved Find and Replace easily takes the place at the top of our list. You can finally search across worksheets within a workbook, and Excel can optionally return all the results in a single window--a timesaving feature we've been waiting for. In addition, it will search on formatting elements as well; in a nice touch, Excel lets you pick up the format of an existing cell to quickly set the parameters of your search.
For those of us who lack consistency in our data entry, or who paste in a lot of data from Web pages, Excel will now catch you if you try to sort columns which combine numbers formatted as numbers and numbers formatted as text. It pops up a dialog that gives you the option to sort all as numbers. Furthermore, Sort no longer lets you accidentally sort only a single column in a sheet used as a list. And AutoSum, now misleadingly named, adds the Average, Count, Max, and Min functions to its repertoire. On the next go-round, we'd like to see Median and Mode as well.
Hard-core formula writers will appreciate another new feature, the Formula Evaluator. The next time a formula's results seem off, simply pop up the Evaluator window and step through the formula one operation at a time. You can also get Excel to displayed the results of all the evaluation steps in a single window rather than just one step at a time, but doing so is a bit more confusing than we'd like. Similarly, the Watch Window makes it easy to monitor how one or more cells update as you make changes elsewhere in the sheet--now you can keep an eye on the bottom line, no matter where it is on the sheet, as you update your budget numbers.
Excel also boosts the capabilities--and, more important, the ease of use--for some of its Web integration tools. For instance, it's now incredibly simple to create dynamic Web queries: Just find the Web page which has the info you need to track and paste it into Excel, and make a few choices. Conversely, if you frequently need to keep a Web page updated with your spreadsheet info, the new Auto Republish option will do so every time you save your workbook.
Some feature enhancements left us less thrilled. We welcome the ability to add a variety of data labels to charts--series name, category name, value, percentage, and bubble size--but you can't define the default place for them relative to the data points. (You can still move them all manually, however). You can also email only selected cells from a worksheet without all the cutting and pasting, but we're still waiting for the ability to do it with discontiguous selections. And the Data Connection Wizard just leaves us bewildered. It's no easier, faster, or comprehensible than the old ODBC Control Panel for creating and maintaining data sources.
The suite-wide crash recovery tools came in most handy with Excel, which we managed to crash at least once a week; under Windows 98 it happened because of system resource constraints, but we're not sure why it crashed occasionally under Windows 2000. And as with Word, Excel now provides XML export. A gratuitous feature or welcome addition? You decide.
Anyone who uses large, multisheet workbooks will probably consider the multi-sheet Find enhancement alone worth the AU$233 upgrade. Overall, among al the Office XP applications Excel 2002 offers perhaps the best argument for making the upgrade.
