There are a handful of capable, solid spreadsheet apps for Mac, but we’ve got our money on Excel thanks to its rich feature set, cross-platform (and web) compatibility, and data management tools.
Aside from some language and performance improvements, Microsoft’s web versions of its Office Apps haven’t seen massive changes since their launch last year. That changed a little over the weekend, with the Excel spreadsheet app adding direct printing from within the app and a number of right-click editing options.
Want to get your geek on while cheering on Australia in the 2011 Rugby World Cup? Microsoft’s Excel Blog highlights a free Excel tracker template which you can use to highlight games for any country and track scores as the tournament progresses. [Excel Blog]
Most Excel users will know about the Fill command, which can be used to rapidly copy data and formulas into a group of cells. But there’s also a related option that can make it easy to add selected data: end mode.
Excel has handy keyboard shortcuts for everything from bulleted lists to text wrapping. The official Excel blog offers up PDF cheat sheets for the most common shortcuts, sorted into Control-triggered shortcuts, function keys and other oddities.
One of the most common problems with some Excel workbooks (and other types of spreadsheets) is painfully slow load times and updates. There are three typical cuprits: too many calculations, too much formatting, and unnecessary file overhead. Here’s how to fix them.
Google Docs is great for collaboratively building documents, but the feature set in its spreadsheet has lagged a long way behind desktop alternatives such as Excel. The introduction of pivot tables, which allow large amounts of data to be quickly summarised, is a major step forward for the platform.
Excel has long had a feature allowing you to add background shading to cells, but if you use non-standard colours then replicating them can be fiddly. Excel 2010 makes that process easier with a simple but obvious tweak: a list of recently-used colours on the Fill drop-down (the small bucket) in the Ribbon.
Managing finances is largely a matter of careful planning, but it’s still something that many of us struggle with. The government-backed MoneySmart site covers a large amount of ground in covering basic financial management for Australians, looking at everything from personal budget planning to debt management to superannuation.
