NicolasV  | 2007-06-21
Advanced, but worth the r
Excel 2003 is very powerful - actually most users probably use less than 5% of the features. For advanced users like financial analysts or statisticians, this power may be necessary. For the rest of us, openoffice.org Calc does the job perfectly, and for free!

SarunasB  | 2007-01-03
State of the art ?
Excel was one the the break-through applications from MS, and is currently perhaps the most adopted from all the Office Suite components. Everpresend in financial institutions (particularly thanks to an extensive Bloomberg API), it is easy to approach and does not require extensive programming knowledge or know-how to use, and one will gradually learn how to enhance one's spreadsheets and reach more advanced levels of complexity. For larger amounts of data or macro code, though, can become quickly overloaded or even crash.

deviltail_99  | 2006-09-14

Iulia  | 2007-06-25
Very powerful
Although most of the people use excel sheets for planing and calculations that imply averages and sums, this Microsoft tool is a lot more powerful. For example I used some Excel applications developed for financial analysis and calculations that were pretty complex. They involved data import from .txt files, price calculations, document generation based on the information from another sheet, password protection of the sheets and many other features that are not regularly used. The advantage of using excel sheets was that they were easy to send to the other departments via e-mail or internal file upload procedures.