Amazon.co.uk Review
Office Excel 2003 is a superb tool for working with figures. Once your data is in Excel, it is easy to perform calculations, analyse results and create charts and reports. An Excel formula can use any of hundreds of functions, covering statistics, finance, mathematics, engineering and database access. Fire up the chart wizard, and you can present data in one of hundreds of chart types, or create your own customised chart. Another important feature is what-if analysis. You can create scenarios using different assumptions, and switch between them to discover how they impact other figures, or use the Solver tool to discover what values you need to input to achieve a desired result. Pivot charts and pivot tables let you view the same data in many different ways, for example viewing sales by region, by salesperson, by quarter, or by product category.
Office Excel 2003 can also be used as a development platform. It includes Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and almost every part of Excel can be manipulated programmatically, either from VBA or from external applications.
Office Excel 2003 includes a new object called a List. Somewhat like a spreadsheet within a spreadsheet, a List has its own headings and data which you can manage, update and share independent of other data in the worksheet. Another new feature is Information Rights Management, which lets you restrict access to specified individuals, allowing either full control or read-only viewing. It must be used with care, since it requires a Rights Management Server and recipients need either Excel or an Excel viewer, but could be useful for sensitive data. Office Excel 2003 also has much improved XML support, enabling data to be structured according to a custom schema, or parsed and modified by any external application that can work with XML.
Spreadsheets are phenomenally useful, and Office Excel 2003 is a mature product that has the lion's share of the market. It is at the heart of Microsoft's Office suite, and benefits from the familiar Office appearance as well as shared tools like spell checking and drawing. --Tim Anderson
Product Description
Microsoft Office Excel 2003 enables you to turn data into information with powerful tools to analyze communicate and share results. Excel 2003 can help you work better in teams and help protect and control access to your work. In addition you can work wit