Columns

Vapourware, hardly confined to computers, is like an impossibly enticing concept car from a manufacturer which has neither a production line nor any other products. But it is nothing compared to wiltware, the software equivalent of a huge luxury box of chocolates containing a few small fragments of chocolate buried among exuberant wrappings. Wiltware is all bark and no bite, mutton dressed up as lamb, a pig in a poke, a codpiece in need of Viagra.

Microsoft had done much to tell us how wonderful Office 2008 was going to be. With its tempting series of sneak previews at the end of last year, there had been an awful lot of barking going on. As the last major product to run native on Intel processors, and the first to be launched well after the widespread adoption of Leopard, Microsoft's Mac Business Unit has had ample opportunity to get it right. I was excited when my copy of its Special Media Edition arrived, eagerly installed it on my Eight Core Mac Pro, and was quick to get to grips with its unique spreadsheet.

Microsoft Excel 2008 has proved to be everything that I feared most about the release. Although not a heavy user of spreadsheets, I do use Excel a lot for visualising data, most commonly columns of measurements in X-Y charts. Good old Excel 2004 had a mildly irritating Charting Wizard that allowed me to generate X-Y charts quite quickly and simply, although it had persistent idiocies such as always making the chart area grey.

I have looked in vain in Excel 2008

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for any wizard or similar easy route to the type of chart that I want. Instead I now have to select my data and then create the chart on top of it using the Chart Gallery: ostensibly quicker, but the only way to put the new chart onto its own page seems to be to right-click it and move it there.

Then the shenanigans start. Setting custom options, such as axis ranges, line and symbol colours, has become much more complex and ponderous. Although always good to have options, Excel 2008 overwhelms with them, and they are often hardly logical. Symbols indicating data points are now bizarrely termed 'markers', and their colour is set in an option named 'marker line', although they are not lines at all, and this is distinct from the line that connects data points, called just 'line'. But after each change to any of those options, the spinning beachball indicates that Excel 2008 is struggling to implement those changes even on my Eight Core.

More worryingly, snooping around what Excel 2008 is doing, it is clear that its spinning beachballs occur when one core is at maximum load, and there is no load on any other core. In other words, the action that I am waiting for is implemented in a single thread, and will thus be no quicker on my Eight Core than your iMac. So we are all going to waste a lot of time waiting for Excel's painfully slow actions, at least until Intel ships 20GHz processors. Maybe this is still a beta release, complete with debugging instruments?

Like the rest of Office 2008, Excel also seems essentially incompatible with Spaces, one of Leopard's best features. If the Office 2008 installer had not been so keen to remove all its traces, I would be sorely tempted to revert to Office 2004.

Although Apple's Numbers is a delightful and promising first effort, it still has some omissions, and is not ready for duty in producing 'scientific' plots based on X-Y graphs. Given another couple of years' development, I am sure that it could sweep up such specialist needs, and I hope that Apple will persevere to make it a real contender against Excel.