Product Reviews

Many of the most visible enhancements to Excel 2000 apply across the whole of Office 2000. However, if you dig around a little beneath the surface, there are some very significant improvements to the world's favourite spreadsheet app itself.

The cosmetic changes Excel 2000 shares with other Office applications include new, bigger File Open and File Save dialogs, which are easier to use and give quicker access to the most frequently used folders and the new personalised menus, tailored to show the most often required tools first.

Personally, I find that with the personalised menus turned on I spend too long playing hunt the option, and I think this feature could drive technical support people round the bend. I do, however, like the fact that all open workbooks show on the taskbar, even if Excel's retainment of the Multiple Document Interface, rather than Word's new Single Document Interface, seems like inconsistency across the suite.

You also get the new standard mail header toolbar for sending files to other people via email, the updated HTML help system, which can be used with or without the animated Assistants, and the new clipboard. This can hold many snippets collected from any app, and you can paste them individually or all at once. Moreover, because HTML is now the format for clipboard data, you can cut and paste or drag and drop tables directly from your Web browser into Excel.

Behind the scenes some of those shared features help Excel 2000 along. The Install on Demand and self-repair features of the Windows Installer will make roll-outs easier, and the single executable and add-on language-specific DLLs will help multilanguage companies along. The native XLS file format hasn't changed but Excel 2000 will also save files in HTML format without any loss of fidelity. This means you can view your workbooks using a Web browser without loading Excel. A separate feature allows users to publish all or part of a workbook to an intranet or the Internet. The workbook then retains details as to what was published and, if changes are made to the workbook later, the information can easily be republished to the same place. If you want to publish live instead of static data to your intranet, you can simply use the Spreadsheet, Chat and PivotTable Web components that ship with Excel 2000. Note that end users require an Office licence to use them.

The PivotTable

Excel's PivotTable has become a lot easier to use. Previously you had to use a separate dialog to make changes to the table, but now you just drag and drop data columns directly on to the PivotTable, and filter, sort and group the results. There are also some great new AutoFormat options to make complex results easier to read. PivotTables can now be produced directly from OLAP Data Cubes held in Microsoft's Decision Support Server. This allows you to analyse

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gigabytes or terabytes of data in seconds. This is seriously impressive stuff but don't feel left out if you don't have an OLAP server. The PivotTable works nearly as well on data from SQL Server, Access or just another Excel Workbook. If you have large amounts of data, the Pivot operation can take a while as all the data has to be summarised.

Excel makes use of Microsoft Query to get at the external data, and Query can now produce OLAP data cubes of just about any data you have, with an OLAP Cube Wizard to guide you through the process. You can store the cube definitions or the definitions and the data in files on your PC or on the network, and then analyse the cube data using the PivotTable whenever you want, without having to design or produce the cube every time.

To complement the PivotTable, the new PivotGraph tool allows you to graph the data in a user-friendly drag and drop format that allows you to show exactly what you want.

As well as connections to OLAP servers and ODBC data sources, Excel can now connect to any OLEDB provider. OLEDB providers can get at hierarchical as well as relational data, including directory services such as Microsoft Exchange and Windows 2000 Directory Services. Meanwhile, it's now possible to connect workbooks to live data appearing on the Web. A Web Query Wizard turns grabbing data from a Web page into a simple, step-by-step process, and the resulting workbook can be set to update itself whenever it's opened.

A few other changes are welcome, but less dramatic. Highlighting cells in Excel used to invert all the colours, which occasionally made it hard to read the data, but Excel 2000 highlights data by lightly shading it. Improvements have also been made to the AutoFill function, which now works with formulas and formatting as well as data. You can enter just a couple of examples of a list, format them the way you want and then drag the AutoFill handle on the selection to fill in the rest of the values. If you click and drag the AutoFill handle with the right button on the mouse, you get a choice of how to fill the series when you let go of the button. For instance, if you type Jan-1999 and then drag the AutoFill handle with the right button you can choose to fill by months (Jan-99, Feb-99, Mar-99, and so on) or to fill by Year (Jan-99, Jan-00, Jan-01, and so on).

Excel 2000 has a couple of new date formats that include the century and two new administrator settings to make transition to the next millennium easier. Users or administrators can set the date window that controls how two-digit years are interpreted. By default years 00 to 29 are 2000 to 2029, years 30 to 99 are 1930 to 1999. A further setting ensures that dates entered with four-digit years are always displayed with four-digit years. One more up-to-date feature is the inclusion of a Euro Currency Tools Add-In. This provides some extra format options for displaying values in euros as well as home currency. It also provides a EUROCONVERT function that will convert between any two European currencies using the approved triangulation method.

Excel 2000's HTML and Web publishing features are the easiest to use and give the best fidelity when compared to the competition: Lotus 1-2-3 and WordPerfect Quattro. If you don't want the HTML or PivotTable functions, I'm not sure if there's much here to tempt Office 97 users to upgrade, but in its new incarnation Excel remains the best spreadsheet package on the market.