Product Reviews

In Office 95, Word took all the glory. With IntelliSense, AutoCorrect and AutoFormat, it was flashy enough to be noticed. While Word 97's improvements are mostly internal, with Excel 97 the spreadsheet moves into the spotlight. It's not a radical reworking, it's the answer to every user's prayers.

Within ten minutes of launching Excel 97, a host of improvements have made their presence felt. The most obvious include multiple levels of undo and redo, and 3D row and column headers that pop up when a cell is selected. AutoFill now pops up a little label showing how far your series has progressed as you drag. As you scroll, the spreadsheet will snap stationary at natural breaks.

Other Office innovations have crept into Excel, such as AutoCorrect. As you type in formul², Excel scans for common errors. For example, missing quote marks and brackets are inserted, and common typos are corrected. Many user formatting problems are resolved. For example, if you enter numbers with commas, they're removed by default, ensuring that the figure is stored as a number not text. Misplaced spaces, colons and so on are corrected intelligently. The '*' operator is automatically inserted if Excel senses that a formula implies multiplication.

Perhaps the cleverest new application of the IntelliSense principle is what Microsoft calls 'Natural Language Formulas'. For years, Excel users have been able to name ranges of cells and then use the name in a formula rather than cell references. This makes formul² both easier to understand and debug.

'=CostPerUnit*NoOfUnits' is easier to understand than '=C135*D135', but the process of naming ranges is cumbersome and many users don't bother. The Natural Language function interprets implied names. For example, if column C is titled 'Cost Per Unit' and column D 'No Of Units', if you type in column E the formula '=Cost Per Unit*No Of Units', Excel intelligently parses this as if you'd explicitly named the ranges.

Not only that, but you can combine Row and Column headings to form compound names. If the row heading was 'Europe' and the column heading 'Price', the Natural Language function could interpret 'Europe Price' as the intersection of the two.

Previously the use of colour in Excel has been overlooked. Now each range in a formula is assigned a colour as you edit the cell. The corresponding range on the worksheet is given a border of the same colour. This simplifies identification of cells within complex formul². What's more, if you grab the colour-coded border with the cursor, you can alter its position and cell grouping manually: any changes made in this way are passed back to the formula. Formerly, changing cell references within a formula could only be achieved by manually highlighting the relevant reference in the formula bar before selecting it on the sheet.

Although Excel is essentially a mathematical tool, formatting spreadsheets comes high on a typical user's agenda. Foremost among the developments that will cause rejoicing in offices the world over is the Page Break Preview mode. Fitting spreadsheets onto the printed page used to be a matter of trial and error. You'd set the print area, set the number of pages you wanted it printed on and the spreadsheet would be reduced or enlarged to fit. Now, if you go into Page Break Preview mode, you can see exactly where splits occur and drag them to the desired place. Reduction or enlargement is calculated on the fly. It makes life much simpler for MIS departments who spend half their time formatting spreadsheets so that the quarterly summary is on the bottom of page 1, not the top of page 2.

The range of text formatting functions has also improved considerably. Text can now be rotated to any angle, improving the readability of grids and indented within cells, obviating the need for tiny columns for purely layout purposes. Groups of cells can be combined to become a single larger cell that adopts the

Another long-awaited feature is the Conditional Formatting function. In previous versions of Excel, making the look of a spreadsheet respond to the data within it required you to write slabs of macro code. Now a cell's font, border and pattern properties can all be made dependent on its numerical value or formula content: up to three different conditional formats can be specified for each cell. So, for example, if you want to highlight high-spending customers in blue, lapsed accounts in green and accounts in arrears in red with a heavy box around, you can do this without writing a single line of code.

The Chart Wizard is easier to use and every charting function can be accessed from within it - not the case in Excel 95. Data series definition is slightly less confusing, and there are a few new chart types including bubble charts, and the charmingly titled 'Pie of Pie Chart'. This lets you zoom in on a particular pie slice and create a sub-pie based on a breakdown of components in the slice.

The Office drawing toolbar means that complex line art can be incorporated into a chart object. Placing a company logo behind a graph is simpler than ever, as is applying gradient fills and other visual effects.

Many of Excel 97's new features are designed to bring the spreadsheet user out of quarantine. Excel can now be utilised more effectively by workgroups. Office 95 allowed multiple users into the same sheet at once, but only for data entry. Office 97 lets users make wholesale alterations to formul², formats and spreadsheet structure at the same time. In keeping with the advanced workgroup ethos of Office 97, Excel now has a versioning system. Changes to shared sheets are tracked and colour-coded, and it's easy to see who has changed what and when. Spreadsheet owners can review changes and accept or reject them. As inexperienced users can destroy months of skilled design work, this is invaluable for the IT department that wants to let its users roll their sleeves up. Come to that, the users themselves will also benefit from this safety net.

Comment implementation has been improved: they're now attributed to the user who enters them, and are easier to spot and read. Users' view preferences can be saved too, so that when they open a shared file it defaults to their own Excel settings.

Beyond workgroup computing lies the corporate intranet - and beyond that, the Internet itself. Like all the main Office 97 components, Excel is now Internet smart. If you select Hyperlink from the Insert menu and type in a URL, a hyperlink appears in the selected cell; you can also access the Net from your spreadsheet workspace with the Web toolbar.

However, the real power of Excel/Internet connectivity is unleashed by the Web Query function. You insert a predefined Web query into a spreadsheet so that it hunts the Internet for a particular piece of tabulated data and drags it back into the Excel spreadsheet for manipulation in Excel's native form.

Microsoft supplies a few queries and there are some more on the Office CD, but they're all aimed at the US financial market. You can design Web queries, but it's a job for the IT department. We're still a long way from being able to drag an HTML table from Explorer into a spreadsheet and see a live link created, but in Excel 97 you can use cell references within formul² that point to spreadsheets held on an Internet or intranet server.

Excel 97 can save documents as HTML via an add-in that walks you through the process. You specify the range or ranges you want to include in your HTML document as tables, and the add-in goes off and creates them. As HTML tables can be a pain, this simplifies matters somewhat. It works in reverse, too: HTML documents on your corporate Intranet can be opened within Excel and any tables automatically flowed into appropriate cells.

Excel 97 has become much more usable. Those who've invested time in the previous version of Visual Basic for Excel will have a head start over those progressing from WordBasic. It's at the user level that Excel impresses. Improved formatting including conditional events, the use of 'Natural Language' in formula creation - these save time and increase productivity. There's something for everyone in this upgrade, from the small businessman to the corporate IT manager.