Unveiling Excel 2007

The same lame data sources such as FreeEDGAR still refuse to cooperate. (There should be a law against EDGAR's policy of placing the closing parenthesis of negative value in a separate column so you can't import an active statement easily.) So you will probably still end up paying for an aggregator such as EDGARPro or 10k Wizard.

And you can expect Microsoft to attempt to muscle you into its data sources. Almost every option leads to a Microsoft Money site or similar feature, which is a complete pain, since who uses those?

But once you have the data in a sheet where you can use it, and you get a bit of practice, get ready to set this baby on rock 'n' roll.

There is an excellent "Format as Table" function that not only takes the drudgery out of jazzing up format, it also brings fancy display functions once only found in Access or other reporting packages straight to Excel. The numbers may not be right, but they will look right.

In this case, I turned Mister Softee's balance sheet and income statement into a nice two-tone, light-green table in just a few clicks, no PowerPoint necessary. And I made some neat charts that broke out by-unit performance on the fly.

Mac Mode

Mac users -- in yet another display of the goofy needling that goes on between Microsoft and Apple AAPL -- will have to wait for the new Excel 2007. Microsoft loves to delay the release of the Apple riffs; the company says it will serve up the updated version of Excel, along with the entire Office package, in the second half of this year.

Apple users wanting a taste of the new Excel today can load the Windows operating system on their machines, assuming they are running a modern Mac with an Intel chip. But only use this solution as a demo, or if it costs you nothing to implement. Don't pay for it. Dual-boot solutions for Apple machines -- Boot Camp and the rest -- can eat up valuable processing resources, which can slow Excel down.

On a positive note for Apple users, I expect Excel 2007 for the Mac to be simply fabulous. Much of its new interface is based on design principles defined by Apple: Window's new ribbon is a direct lift from the Mac.

And honestly, the integrated design environment of Macs may turn out to be the perfect way for the nonnumeric, interface-intolerant number cruncher to take full advantage of Excel's new display and collaboration features.

We could be looking at the ultimate cosmic irony: The best way to run Excel will be on an Apple machine.

It's very fashionable right now to beat up on Microsoft. Vista and Word 2007 have gotten a lot of bad press. But don't let the fact that most journalists don't know a spreadsheet from a bedsheet blind you as to what this program is.

Excel 2007 is a significant step forward.

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