Spreadsheet Makeover in The Globe and Mail

The Globe and Mail - June 19, 2007

Excel is the workhorse of the global office.

By Ted Kritsonis

Microsoft says 750 million people use the trusty spreadsheet application worldwide, making it the most widely used tool in its Office suite, aside from the Outlook e-mail manager and calendar.

But despite the software's longevity and popularity, it hasn't evolved much over the years. Until now, that is. Excel 2007 represents the first real evolution of the software after 10 years of "laughable cosmetic changes," as a renowned Excel expert puts it.

"It was almost like innovation in spreadsheets had just stopped," according to Bill Jelen, a full-time Excel consultant better known as Mr. Excel. "But Excel 2007 is definitely a large leap forward because, among other things, the grid has expanded, individual cells have a chart attached and there are better filtering functions."

At least 100,000 Canadians took part in the beta version of Excel 2007, though there are no figures on how many are using it since it launched to enterprise customers last fall.

One change will be warmly received. In a typical Excel spreadsheet, the myriad different numbers can often make little sense. But now, with three mouse clicks, the data boxes, or "cells," change colour so that the largest numbers show up in green and the smallest in red.

For the manager who dreads filtering through numbers, this saves a lot of time because the trouble spots are now in plain view. It's the first time spreadsheet makers have been able to do that with Excel.

Jelen's most recent book, Charts and Graphs for Microsoft Office Excel 2007, is aimed at business users and highlights many of these changes. One that would serve most businesses well, he says, is a renewed ability to find duplicate entries in a large spreadsheet. The value of that ability isn't hard to imagine. Say a user was tasked with figuring out how many specific customers a business may have had over the past year. A download of all the invoices from the last fiscal year shows 50,000 records--but that doesn't necessarily mean 50,000 different customers, because there may have been repeat business. Jelen says it would have taken 20 minutes to filter all that information on older versions of Excel, but three clicks gets the job done now.

But even with the timely new features and the highly touted "Ribbon" menu that's a staple of all Microsoft Office 2007 applications, Jelen criticizes the removal of the original menu format and layout. "It's estimated that the average business Excel user knows only 30% of the new application's functions," Jelen says. "It's great to let users know about features that were already in there, but for those who use Excel 40 to 60 hours a week and knew where everything was under the old menu system, it's a real annoyance."

Mike Bulmer, senior product manager for Microsoft Office in Canada, says that the software giant was trying "to be careful with incremental innovations" by balancing them with core functionality. That essentially translated into the addition of the Ribbon and raising awareness about the software's deeper functions. "The product had outgrown the old structure," Bulmer says. "We had user feedback suggesting that features were hard to find, so we overhauled everything to make things easier and more accessible with the Ribbon."

Until now, having two or more employees collaborate on one single Excel document has been virtually impossible, a fact that Jelen laments. But Bulmer says that a company using SharePoint, Microsoft's enterprise complement to its Windows Server offering, can have many people working on a single Excel spreadsheet in real time.

This could save time for a finance department taking in budget requests from other departments, for example. Rather than have a template that gets passed around, or using multiple Excel documents, the numbers could be inputted to the same spreadsheet simultaneously.

This isn't particularly new, but it can be expensive. And of course, it's contingent on whether the business is running Windows Server.

Yet where Microsoft has seemingly missed the boat, others have picked up the slack. The lack of innovation in the software over the years has brought out the entrepreneurial spirit in some. Most recently, a developer from China was able to create an add-on that allows Excel 2007 users to go with the older 2003 menu system--something Microsoft developers initially said was too difficult to do, according to Jelen. "When I opened Excel 2007, I couldn't find some of the features," Lin Jie explains in an e-mail interview. "I searched on the Internet for a solution but found nothing, so I figured if I needed the old menu, then others might need it too."

Lin has been using Excel for 13 years, but it took him just two months to create his patented "Classic Menu" and is now looking to sell retail licences of his software.

And he's not alone. Charles Steinhardt used his 20-year experience as an IT architect on Wall Street to develop ToolbarToggle, an add-on that brings back the old Excel menu system to work in tandem with the Ribbon or replace it entirely. Plus, it comes cheap--only $20 or less if bought in bulk. "Our enterprise customers who use Excel are ecstatic because they can continue working the way that they always have and incorporating the best of the Ribbon as they need it," says Steinhardt, CTO of IT solutions for Venture Architects in New York. "Most Excel users don't want to think about the path to execute their macros and commands. They need their toolbars just 10 pixels from where they are working."

Taking a similar path, in 2002, Keith Bradbury and David Moon, both Toronto natives and co-founders of InvestinTech.com Inc., launched the first version of Able2Extract, a mini-application that allows users to view and export PDF files using Excel. Version 5.0 will be launching this summer, Bradbury confirms.

The knock against PDFs has always been that there's no way to edit or manipulate the data within them, thereby forcing people to retype everything in their desired format when they want to extract something. "Able2Extract has a huge advantage in terms of time savings and accuracy, since it can take the PDF data and quickly convert it into a formatted Excel spreadsheet for easy analysis," Bradbury explains.

He adds that Able2Extract can also convert PDFs into Word or PowerPoint, while retaining the formatting, graphics and text of the PDF in Word. The software has been so successful that licences have been sold to corporations in more than 50 countries.

For his part, Jelen likes the way independent developers are taking part in making Excel a better application, but feels more needs to be done. "Excel needs new charting types," he says. "Although Microsoft rewrote the charting engine, they didn't have enough time to add a speedometer chart, which is very popular. It's great that developers are putting their talents out there to fill the gap, but this is also stuff that should've been in there already."