Microsoft Excel 2002 Upgrade

Rating:
Summary: Expensive, but has several useful new features.
Review: Excel 2002 has several enhancements over version 2000.

The autosum feature now also allows you to auto average, minimum, and maximum functions.

Another handy feature is you can now copy up to 24 different items to the clipboard. Unfortunatly Excel still doesn't allow you to add or delete row, columns, and cells without loosing the items on your clipboard. It would be useful to add or delete to make space to adjust the your clipboard materials. Lotus 123 has had this feature for years.

The smart tags are both a help and a pain. They are useful if you want to change your formatting. If you don't need them, however, they are like an ugly blot on your worksheet (They don't appear on the printed copy, only on your terminal).

The pivot table setup has a new and friendlier interface. The formula evaluation is tremendously improved. If you make an error in your formula, it is easier to trace it out.

Overall I think 2002 has more improvements than 2000 had over 97.

Rating:
Summary: Expensive, but has several useful new features.
Review: Excel is certainly an excellent spreadsheet tool. However, it can also serve as an tool for text-only tasks. The ability to chart information, in text or numeric form, makes this a useful tool for presenting the written word as well. Although much of my work is in text, whever I need a table of pure text, I use Excel rather than a text-processing application. Excel-based spreadsheets, text tables, and charts can be used in presentations with impressive results. Excel is one reason why, in my opinion, Microsoft has no competition in this area.

Rating:
Summary: Not only a spreadsheet
Review: Excel is certainly an excellent spreadsheet tool. However, it can also serve as an tool for text-only tasks. The ability to chart information, in text or numeric form, makes this a useful tool for presenting the written word as well. Although much of my work is in text, whever I need a table of pure text, I use Excel rather than a text-processing application. Excel-based spreadsheets, text tables, and charts can be used in presentations with impressive results. Excel is one reason why, in my opinion, Microsoft has no competition in this area.

Rating:
Summary: Excel does have competition: StarOffice, OpenOffice.org
Review: No one's arguing about whether Excel is good. It's a fine product. But given the cost, just of an upgrade to keep in line with whatever new features were created to justify the upgrade revenue, it's a joke. Unless you're a turbo macro user, or if you truly love Excel so much you don't mind it being a money pit, just go use the Excel-compatible spreadsheet in StarOffice or OpenOffice.org. The first reviewer is wrong--Microsoft does have competition, and it's from low-priced and *free* products.