Version 5 of Excel is here at last! Fork over your money, clean the old files off your hard drive, find a quiet hour or so for installation, and start exploring.
Excel 5, like Microsoft Word, is the product of a design philosophy explained over the years by Microsoft chief software architect Charles Simonyi. The philosophy, crudely paraphrased, is, “We find out what features people want and we program them. We don’t optimize or fine-tune unless absolutely necessary since that takes too long and the chip makers will take care of our performance problems eventually. CPUs get faster and memory gets cheaper, and we want to get products out the door now.”
Thus, Microsoft is producing software with stunningly rich feature sets and jaw-dropping resource requirements. The Power Macintosh version of Excel takes nearly 30MB of hard drive space and needs 24MB of RAM to run comfortably (there’s not much point running a program on a RISC processor and forcing it to use virtual memory). You can’t run Excel 5 at all on a Plus, Classic, or SE (it takes a 68020 processor or higher), and it’s very difficult to see how a IIsi, for example, could be upgraded to be a useful Excel 5 box. If you strip System 7 down to its shorts (a bit under 2MB), you can get a minimal Excel to run in 4MB, good news for owners of stock PowerBooks, but you will have only a few K left for files. On a 680X0 Mac, realistically figure on 8MB of RAM and 25MB of free disk space for a happy installation experience.
Everything You Could Want
There’s a wonderland of new features in all this expanse. Microsoft is delivering die software of tomorrow, but it may need the hardware of tomorrow.
Pivot tables are powerful and nicely implemented. You can take any table of data in which pieces of information are arranged by categories — for example, sales data by Region, by Month, by Product — and make a table in which categories are either row or column labels that you can switch simply by dragging them across the table.
Trendlines are also a shortcut to analytical power. If you select a set of points in an Excel chart (just click on the points), you can pick Trendline from the Insert menu. This gives you options from plain linear regression to data smoothing to complicated curve-fitting — almost the whole range of possible statistical analyses is packaged here as a set of convenient dialog-box choices.
The old Excel macro language is still recognized, somewhat, but Excel macros are now automatically recorded in Microsoft's Visual Basic. Version 5 can run version 4 macros, as long as the macros don’t look for functions or menu items that have changed. Fve run dozens of shareware Excel 4 templates and macros under version 5 with no trouble, but developers with more ambitious programs report loads of problems. Ultimately, developers working with Excel will probably just rewrite their work in Visual Basic. A Visual Basic macro is eas}- to edit, and the language allows you to write clear programming-statements. Because applications in Visual Basic are automatically cross-platform to Windows, and because writing in Visual Basic inside Excel lets you concentrate on functional details and leave the interface details to the environment, you can expect technical- and financial-application add-ins for Excel 5 over the next year.
Finally, the other important new power feature is simply that the default file for Excel 5 is the Workbook, a set of grouped worksheets (you decide the number of worksheets per Workbook). This greatly simplifies constructing three-dimensional data tables (which can also be used in pivot tables) and makes it much easier to organize projects.
The Wizards in this version of Excel are necessities rather than conveniences. The Tip Wizard, a chatty little backseat driver at the top of the screen, points out features you could have used, based on your last selections. The Function Wizard now provides, in effect, a tutorial on functions and the arguments you must enter for the correct results. ToolTips, a sort of balloon help that explains the functions of the vast array of buttons, is available if you pause the cursor over a particular button. Since the feature scope of Excel 5 now fits awkwardly in the traditional Mac dialog box, formatting and settings dialog boxes sport tabs (like the ones on file folders), which group options into easy-to-reach sections.
The shipping version of Excel 5 (compared with the many beta versions) shows acceptable recalc times on 680X0 Macs — the times on a Quadra 610 are remarkably similar to the recalc times, for the same worksheet, for Excel 2.2 on a IIcx (I’ve been doing this a long time). The Power Mac version on a 6100 with 24MB of RAM performed seven to eight times as fast as the 680X0 version on a Quadra 610. At present, the recalc speed champion on the Power Mac is the spreadsheet in Claris Works’ Power Mac version, 2.1, which lacks many of Excel’s features, but which nonetheless represents a real alternative to Excel, especially for users who bought the standard configuration of 8MB of RAM. In Microsoft’s view, tweaking recalc times in seconds is not the issue — getting better-looking reports and better data analysis on a timescale of days is what’s important. The main performance complaint arises from sheer bulk — on older machines with slow hard drives. Excel 5’s bigger size means start-up times are annoyingly slow.
Why So Big?
Microsoft is testing the philosophical proposition that the only way to make software better is to add features, not to simplify. For example, look at the in-cell editing capabilities (“rich cell editing” in Microsoft-speak). Not only can you resize individual cells to fit any text, but you can edit the text in cells character by character. Each text-containing cell in Excel 5 is for all practical purposes now the equivalent of a page in the original MacWrite — you could use Excel as your word processor for small tasks! Capabilities like this expand code size.
Another reason Excel 5 is big is that many capabilities are implemented inefficiently. The Analysis Tool Pak Add-In, which offers a modest set of statistical routines that work inside Excel, takes 729K as a separate module. In contrast, the stand-alone statistics application DataDesk 4 manages to fit a huge range of capabilities, including rotating 3-D graphs, notebooks, and dozens of advanced functions, into 900K. The Tool Pak routines would take about 60K in the hands of DataDesk’s programmers. Besides this, there’s a terrifying level of redundancy. I counted seven different ways (functions, menu commands, add-in features) to perform the same linear regression analysis.
The Last Word
Excel 5 is a relentlessly complete tool kit for analyzing numbers. That means it’s huge, but recalc performance on midrange and low-end machines is acceptable. Nonetheless, it’s the fanciest spreadsheet and the choice for serious business work.
Seiter, Charles. (January 1995). Microsoft Excel 5.0. Macworld. (pgs. 54-55).
Microsoft Corporation
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Microsoft_Excel_5.0_French.zip
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
