Microsoft Excel 2010 review
in Software
1 of 3 
Verdict
Not a spectacular leap forward, but loads of small improvements amount to a significant upgrade
Review Date: 1 Jun 2010
Reviewed By: PC Pro staff
Price when reviewed: £79 (£93 inc VAT)
Overall Rating
Features & Design
Ease of Use
Excel 2007 effectively rewrote the rulebook on spreadsheet usability. The introduction of the Ribbon changed forever the way we interacted with the application and we've never looked back. There's understandably nothing so extraordinary this time around, but Excel 2010 still has a few tricks up its sleeve.
Full Office 2010 reviews
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Microsoft Office 2010 the verdict
The global changes that permeate the rest of the suite are all present here. Backstage view works well, particularly the combined Print/Print Preview function, while the redesigned, customisable Ribbon will be of use to those who regularly use Excel's more esoteric functions.
But, for heavy users, the most important changes are under the hood. The most noticeable area is in the rendering of charts and in loading large workbooks with many sheets, where Excel can now take advantage of multicore processors to load the sheets in parallel.
If you're running the 64-bit version of either Windows Vista or Windows 7, you also get the choice of installing the 64-bit version of Office 2010, the principal advantage of which is to let you work with Excel workbooks larger than 2GB. 64-bit Excel also works faster on large workbooks than the 32-bit version, provided you give it enough memory, but choose carefully before going down the 64-bit route as some third-party plugins may not work and your VBA macros may need recoding. Elsewhere, PivotTables and PivotCharts run faster, thanks to multithreading. Reporting from SQL Server Analysis Services has been expanded with support for Named and Dynamic sets, and calculations can be written back to the data cube to be summarised.
If you need to analyse millions of rows, or data from multiple sources, you can use the new PowerPivot for Excel. This separate plugin for Excel gives fast access to mountains of data, automatically analysing relationships between tables and presenting disparate data as a coherent whole.
From around the web
Due to the way Excel 2007 and 2010 handles .MHT files, I have to stick with 2003.
By james016 on 2 Jun 2010 
Or you could just update your working practices?
By GillsMan7 on 2 Jun 2010
MHT Files
Can you explain the problem you're having with MHT files?
By Simon_Jones_RWC on 2 Jun 2010
We have some spreadsheets that contain formulae. When saved as a .mht, all the formulae are removed and the values become static numbers.
We use .mhts as other departments use these spreadsheets for reference and they are displayed in a browser as they are stored in Sharepoint. I should say that they are internal documents only.
By james016 on 2 Jun 2010
MHT Files
MHT is a final format for publishing static documents, not a revisable format. It is comparable to PDF and you would not expect PDF to retain the formulae.
If you use SharePoint Foundation 2010 (and add the Office Web Apps) you can view your XLSX through SharePoint without having to store them as MHT files.
By Simon_Jones_RWC on 2 Jun 2010
Saving a sheet to a singe file webpage which can only be opend in IE
Now saving a sheet to a single file web page saves to a new format (.mht .mhtml extension) that can only be opened in IE.
My Macros no longer create a single html file as they did in 2003 so I have to use 2003 as I do not want my files restricted to being opened in IE.
What a CON!
By xnelmes on 2 Jun 2010
MHT vs HTML
You can choose to save as either HTML or MHT.
Use the xlHTML or the xlWebArchive respectively constants for the file types.
See http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb241279(o
ffice.12).aspx for the full list of file types.
MHT is Mime encapsulated HTML which keeps any embedded files such as icons, graphics, etc in the one file. HTML format has to save those items as separate files with links from the HTML code.
By Simon_Jones_RWC on 3 Jun 2010
MHTML
By the way, MHTML was defined as an Internet standard in March 1999 as RFC 2557.
IE and Opera both understand it. Firefox has plug-ins to make it read it (but there may be some compatibility problems). Google Chrome doesn't support it.
MHTML is a well defined and long lived standard. If your browser doesn't support it then put pressure on the browser maker or change your browser.
By Simon_Jones_RWC on 3 Jun 2010
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