Excel 3.0 is more than just an upgrade of the most popular spreadsheet program for the Mac. Innovative new tools boost Excel's data-analysis power, and the program’s presentation-quality output gains more polish. But best of all, these considerable enhancements haven’t decreased the program's accessibility. In fact, the new version of Excel is easier to use than its predecessors.
One-Stop Tool Bar
The first readily apparent change to Excel is the new tool bar. which extends beneath the main menu headings. The tool bar provides handy, one-stop shopping for commonly used spreadsheet functions. For example, rather than requiring several steps to sum a row or column of numbers. Excel 3.0 lets you click once on the Autosum button. Autosum is smart enough to analyze your data and select the numbers either above or to the left of the active cell for summation. With tool-bar functions, you can also set cell formatting and alignment, position a chart, add a text block, or use a marquee to select graphics objects in a worksheet.
An innovative addition is Excel 3.0's outlining capability, which lets you outline your data much as you outline text with a word processor. If you have many levels of information on a worksheet, for example, you can organize it hierarchically so that detail data is subordinated to the corresponding summary rows. You can organize your data outline manually, or you can let Excel automatically create the appropriate categories and subcategories of a selected range for you — which it does very well. The program supports eight levels of outline in all.
Once you’ve created an outline, you can expand and collapse it to show the various levels of detail, using the outline icons. This provides a terrific method for quickly and easily creating a variety of summary reports,
A host of other improvements to version 3.0 make Excel more accessible to novices and more convenient for power users. If you’ve ever fussed with sizing column widths far a worksheet, for example, you’ll welcome the way version 3.0 handles sizing. You double-click on a column border, and Excel then finds the widest element in the column and sets the width accordingly. You can even highlight multiple columns that require different widths, and Excel will set them all to the correct size automatically.
If you’ve ever miscalculated the number of rows or columns needed to accommodate the data before pasting it in to your worksheet, you'll appreciate a new option that creates the appropriate number of cells automatically.
Another handy feature is the Add button in the Define Names dialog box. which lets you define range names more quickly than you could in earlier versions. However, although you can drag the dialog box around within the worksheet to get a bettter view of the ranges you’re looking far, you can’t actually select ranges from within the worksheet while you're accessing the dialog box. This means that most range names created by use or the Add button are likely to refer to simple ranges or constants.
Excel 3.0 no longer makes you plod back and forth from Print Preview to your worksheets in order to fine-tune the final appearance of your worksheets. In earlier versions of Excel, Print Preview let you view documents but wouldn't let you make any changes to them. The new Print Preview lets you change column widths and set margins without returning to your worksheet.
3-D Charts
Excel was the first spreadsheet program to integrate a solid charting tool, and the new version continues to build on this strength. There are 24 new 3-D-Chart options in version 3.0, including area, column, line, and pie charts.
With version 3.0, you can at last combine text, worksheet, and charts on a single page, as well as place more than one chart on a page, to create truly informative reports.
The program also provides drawing tools for creating lines, arrows, rectangles, ovals, and arcs on worksheets. Graphics objects created vvilh Excel's new drawing tools are attached to the underlying cells. This means that when the cells shift, the objects move or change size with them. You can also choose to detach objects from underlying cells if you don't want them altered.
In Excel 3.0, you can use pasted graphics as chart units, stacking or stretching the graphics to fit the corresponding data. You can even play with your data graphically by altering charts with the mouse. Results are reflected in the corresponding worksheet.
Excel 3.0 has style sheets that mimic those of Microsoft Word. You can name combinations of number format, font, alignment, border setting, pattern setting, and cell protection and then apply those settings without repeated returns to the Format menu. A nice finishing touch is a button that lets you copy any predefined style into the current worksheet.
Version 3.0 delivers several enhancements specifically designed for power users. If you've been waiting for a way to consolidate your worksheets, for instance, the wait is over. With Excel 3.0, you can combine data from an unlimited number of worksheets as well as from different ranges within the same worksheet. You can also consolidate by using Links that update your summaries as you edit values. Excel even consolidates worksheets with different row and column positions, as long as they have consistent labeling.
For what-if analysis, Excel 3.0 supplies a powerful new tool called the Goal Seek function. Goal Seek lets you calculate the input values necessary to drive a formula to a specified value without making you use trial and error. For example, the function can provide the monthly sales revenues needed to maintain a 6-percent profit margin when your monthly overhead is $1,800.
The separate Solver application takes Excel's analytical powers even further. The Solver calculates solutions to problems that use multiple variables based on the same formulas. For example, you can use the Solver to calculate a quarterly advertising budget that optimizes profits for the year.
For those who depend heavily on macros, version 3.0 offers several useful improvements. Perhaps the most significant is the ability to create a startup folder for Excel. You can create a special macro sheet named Excel Startup that loads whenever you launch Excel. There's also a new macro-sheet format called Add In that opens macro sheets invisibly and adds their functionality to Excel, just as if they were built in.
Setting Up
Excel 3.0 and all its support files require more than 4 megabytes of disk space for installation. Fortunately, you don't have to install everything. If you're an experienced user, for example, you can save 770K by not installing the program's tutorial.
Excel's documentation is better organized this time around, so it’s easier to find what you're looking for. The Help system is also effective, but unfortunately it loses its place as you navigate through it: Click on a topic, read it, and press the Back button, and the first topic in the list is highlighted rather than the section you just completed.
You also can’t print the Help screens from Excel. Although this may be environmentally correct, it can be truly frustrating, because you can't leave the Help screen open as you try outline prescribed steps.
The Bottom Line
With the addition of the tool bar and numerous other interface enhancements. Excel 3.0 succeeds in being more accessible to novices and more convenient for experienced Excel users.
Moreover, unique features such as the Solver and the outliner provide functionality that no other Mac spreadsheet program offers. The long wait for significant Microsoft Excel upgrades can often he frustrating — version 3.0 was in the works for almost two years — but the result is well worth the wait. Each new version of Excel has included impressive, innovative features. Excel 3.0 is no exception.
Benjamin, Jr., Louis E. (July 1991). Microsoft Excel 3.0. MacUser. (pgs. 56-57).
Microsoft Corporation
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Excel_3.0.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
