Microsoft Excel Review

Microsoft Excel is one of the tools within the Microsoft ecosystem. It helps you organise and present data in a range of ways to help you find trends, analyse information, share spreadsheets with teams and more.

What is Microsoft Excel and who’s it for?

Microsoft Excel is essentially a place to manage and organise data inside spreadsheets, tables, graphs and other dashboard views. You can also share data with others, this might be useful for teams in marketing, sales or businesses making sure they're following trends and making progress.

Microsoft Excel is for anyone who has data they want to manage, this could be for individual use, or for use with teams. You can manage and input any kind of data and learn the formulas to help you organise and rearrange data in a way that makes sense.

Want to learn Excel?

We'd recommend exploring Miss Excel's range of Microsoft Excel's training courses. If you're interest in others, we have a full feature on the best training courses for Excel.

Microsoft Excel Pros

Microsoft Excel is great for managing and organising data and spreadsheets, here are some other best features.

• Copilot - The Copilot feature inside Excel is super useful for analysing and exploring data you input into spreadsheets, it helps you identify trends, any issues and anything you can improve on for your business.
• Spreadsheets - Spreadsheets are the most commonly used for Microsoft Excel, you can customise and input any data to arrange here, from numbers to dates, to words you want in alphabetical order.
• Collaboration - Collaborate with others by sharing spreadsheets with team members, you can also share workbooks to share information.
• Import physical tables - A really handy feature is that you can take a photo of a physical table of data and convert it to a spreadsheet inside M

Microsoft Excel Cons

Microsoft Excel has been around for some time now, 1985 in fact. But what are the cons?

• Steep learning curve - To make the most of Microsoft Excel it's inevitable that you need to learn the formulas for organising and arranging data in spreadsheets. You can use templates and guides to help, but knowing the quick formulas creates a better experience, but this does take time.
• Overwhelming interface - A space with lots of numbers, figures, tables and dashboards in a very simple and plain workspace might not be for everyone, if you want a more inviting application to manage data and information you could try something like Smartsheet.

Microsoft Excel Verdict

So what do we think of Microsoft Excel? This is a well-used, long-standing productivity tool for organising data, growing businesses and using it for a range of different needs. We think this tool will always be a classic productivity tool, it just takes a bit of learning.

Overall Microsoft Excel is a place to input data like numbers, use formulas to organise, and then create dashboards and spreadsheets to organise or better understand information.

Microsoft Excel Alternatives

Here are some alternatives to using Microsoft Excel.

• Smartsheet - Great for managing projects and having a place to also store and organise data with a range of views, tables and dashboards.
• Coda - another popular alternative for Microsoft Excel that can be expanded with formulas and Coda packs.