excel

At a key supercomputing conference on Monday, Microsoft released a test version of its Excel spreadsheet redesigned to run on powerful clusters of servers.

By engineering Excel to run better on such clusters Microsoft said that customers are seeing spreadsheets that normally would take weeks to calculate now run in a few hours.

The software maker also released a beta version of Windows HPC Server 2008 R2--the latest version of Windows Server designed to run in high-performance compute clusters. The announcements were made at the SC09 conference in Portland, Ore.

Microsoft has taken the standard version of Excel 2010 and … Read more

XLCalendar is a simple program that allows users to create custom calendars in Excel. Combining intuitive operation with professional results, this program is a great way to make calendars quickly and easily.

The program's interface is basic, just a gray box with a few buttons and drop-down menus. Users select the calendar template that they want to use and then modify it as needed. Users can select whether they want to abbreviate the names of the months and days, for example, or change the cell in which a particular characteristic is displayed. There are multiple templates, allowing users to … Read more

In 2008, the Council for Research Excellence, a research group funded primarily by Nielsen and staffed by researchers from various media and advertising organizations, studied the media consumption habits of U.S. adults. Researchers followed about 300 people around for two days, in the spring and the fall, using a handheld device to track every single 10-second interval of media that they consumed. The study was mainly focused on video, with the unsurprising result that we watch a lot of TV (more than five hours a day on average).

On Tuesday, the group released a follow-up analysis focused exclusively on … Read more

Batch Replacer for MS Excel is a plug-in for the Useful File Utilities program that allows users to complete find-and-replace tasks in multiple documents at once. The plug-in works but is not particularly easy to use.

We previously reviewed Useful File Utilities on its own and came to the conclusion that it was a mediocre file management tool, more complicated than it really needed to be and without any notable features. Batch Replacer for MS Excel adds an extra bit of functionality, but fits in with the general feel of the program, which is that it's not very easy … Read more

OrgChart Professional is a feature-packed program that allows users to create impressive organizational charts. Because of the number of features it contains, it's not the most intuitive program we've used, but a bit of time spent with the Help file will allow users to master the program's many functions.

The interface is a bit cluttered and can be overwhelming at first, with lots of menus and buttons everywhere. Although it's possible to create an organizational chart just by fooling around with the program, beginners should really start with the Help file, a 282-page PDF that contains … Read more

Explorer for Microsoft Excel allows you to keep several spreadsheets active and available while you're working. With its simple premise and even simpler execution, this a handy tool for frequent Excel users.

Explorer for Microsoft Excel's interface was a breeze for us to pick up, as it perfectly coordinates with Excel's layout and style. It's simply a window within Excel that lets you open several workbooks and organize them within a file tree. We needed to do some light reading in the Help file's instructions to use the hyperlink feature, but we found the program … Read more

Excellerator provides users with fast access to customize their spreadsheets. By making a shortcut to some needed commands, this will improve any Excel experience.

We were pleased to discover the program's simple interface, beginning with the discreet way it embeds icons below Excel's original commands. The program is basically one simple menu to navigate through with large command buttons, drop-down menus, and radio buttons. The various choices instantly hit home for us, because it was a solution to those long searches through Excel to find a specific command or equation we knew existed, but didn't know where. … Read more

EZ-Stat for Excel, Data Presentation Products' statistical analysis add-in for Excel, comes bundled with its EZ-Format for Excel package, but it's also available as a stand-alone add-in. EZ-Stat's whole purpose is to save you time and money by automating common statistical tasks and helping you extract more useful information out of the results. It simplifies and automates calculations in many common Excel formulas. It will calculate only selected formulas in selected rows, making precision analysis a breeze. You can compare results in various sort fields, such as Sales and Cost figures by Region or Product Line. It performs … Read more

The power and features that make Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet the business world's standard can be daunting to new and infrequent users. EZ-Format for Excel makes Excel easy by separating data formatting, maintenance, and analysis tasks. It automates the task of formatting worksheets, enables improved, modifiable totaling, and simplifies common tasks such as splitting worksheets and applying row color. The program bundles the maker's EZ-Subtotal and EZ-Split add-ins as well, and it includes the functionality of the EZ-Stat statistical analysis software.

EZ-Format for Excel integrates seamlessly with Excel, appearing in the Add-Ins Ribbon on the Toolbar. An extensive … Read more