Unveiling Excel 2007

Huddle up, my bean-counting brothers and sisters: Microsoft (MSFT Quote) has brought a flaming new riff on our beloved Excel to market: Microsoft Office Excel 2007.

I've been testing the program for the past few months. My verdict? I'll keep it short: Considering the alternatives, you are a complete dope if you do not run out and get this program, right now. This minute. Today.

This Excel is the real deal.

Spreadsheets for All

For those youngsters who came into the office after the dawn of the desktop era, say the mid-1990s, you missed out on the revelation that was the modern spreadsheet.

Back in the day, we used to feel our way to (that is, totally guess about) the value of things. Portable calculators like the Hewlett-Packard 12c -- which I still have and use, thank you very much -- were the preferred way to find the value of money though time and look for rates of change.

But that all ended when the computer came to the desktop. Suddenly everyone could run a powerful spreadsheet and do their own accurate valuations, advanced statistics and charting, not to mention internal cost analysis and killer shopping lists.

For all the hype surrounding hypertext documents, digital content and the Web, they pale next to the spreadsheet, since this ultimately democratizing valuation tool underpins the modern financial market.

Today it is no longer a top-down, few-telling-us-what's-what world. Now it's a bottom-up market. The many -- the spreadsheet-enabled "us" -- tell the few what the world really is.

There were some early imposters in the spreadsheet game; Lotus 123 and others got the pole position. But Bill Gates knew early what a spreadsheet should be -- he was a numbers guy, after all.

And when Office 97 came to market, that was pretty much that: Excel became the dominant player, growing to well over 450 million active seats today, so says the company.

Now, a decade later, Microsoft has given Office Excel 2007 its biggest makeover yet, one that brings the code to a new position inside the business environment.

"We really tried to make it as easy to use as we could," says Mor Hezi, senior product manager for the Office Marketing team at Microsoft. "We want everybody to use every single feature."

To simplify this Excel, Microsoft has jettisoned its traditional menu architecture and replaced it with the ribbon, a graphical tab that runs across the top of the screen.

The ribbon has been very controversial. In programs such as Word and Outlook it can drive some people, including me, nuts. But here in Excel, the ribbon really works.