Like a world-class athlete, Microsoft seems to thrive on perfecting its game as much as on competing with its rivals. Only one year after shipping the last major release of its best-selling spreadsheet program, Excel. Microsoft has completed version 4.0, an impressive revision that successfully leverages a fairly narrow but key focus — making more accessible the small number of features that get the most use.
Auto-Spreadsheet
Whether you’re a power user or a spreadsheet dilettante, chances are you spend a lot of time fussing with your data to make it look presentable on a worksheet. Microsoft has added an AutoFormat feature that should make formal fussing a thing of the past. Now you can simply select a group of cells, and Excel will automatically apply an aesthetically pleasing format to it.
In addition, you can accomplish many everyday operations in Excel 4.0 simply by dragging. For example, you can select a group of cells and drag them to a new position. Even more useful is the AutoFill feature, which can intelligently create a data series for you. By typing Region 1 into a cell, pressing Enter, and dragging the fill handle (a small square) across several rows or columns, for example, you can get Excel to fill in the appropriate labels — Region 2, Region 3, and so on.
Furthermore, if you select two cells that contain the numbers 10 and 20 and then use the fill handle to drag a selection, Excel will fill subsequent cells with 30, 40, 50, and so on. Excel even recognizes some words — if you type in the labels June and July, you can use AutoFill to complete the monthly labels for your data series. You can also use this feature to clear cells quickly by selecting a large area on a worksheet and then dragging the fill handle to reduce the size of the selected area (the Undo command works in case you drag too far).
With its multiple customizable tool bars, you can tailor Excel 4.0 to fit your work style. You can open the tool bars as resizable floating palettes or dock them on one side of your screen. You can even mix and match buttons among tool bars and add macro buttons to them. If you don't like the look of a button, you can design your own button face in a drawing program and paste it onto the button.
Excel 4.0 makes it even easier to access commonly used commands than the previous version did. If you hold down the Option and Command keys and click on an object. Excel brings up a pop-up menu that contains commands relevant to your selection, whether you’re clicking on a worksheet, tool bar, chart, or graphic object. Excel's Command-Option-click combination can’t be modified, and it may conflict with some third-party utilities, but in most cases, you can reprogram your utilities to use other keystroke combinations. Another new timesaver is the ability to close all open documents with a single command.
Undergoing Analysis
If you regularly construct complex spreadsheet models, several new tools in version 4.0 should make your life easier. The Scenario Manager is an add-in macro for what-if analysis that lets you specify multiple cells as variables. As you run different scenarios on your data by changing the input values of the cells, a summary-report function enables you to draw comparisons among them. For complex what-if scenarios. Excel 4.0 lets you define custom dialog boxes as well as simple macros.
Excel 4.0's new Workbooks ease the process of organizing and navigating related spreadsheet files. When you create a Workbook, you’re actually creating a new file format that’s capable of holding mu1tiple worksheets, charts, and macro sheets. A Workbook table of contents lets you easily navigate the related documents, and you can share the entire collection with coworkers as a single Workbook file rather than as an unwieldy hodgepodge of separate files. To reverse the process, you can unbind documents from Workbooks and use them as standalone worksheets, although you can still reference them through a Workbook’s table of contents.
Anyone who has struggled with Excel 3.0‘s charting module probably has new charting features at the top of their wish list for version 4.0. The good news is that version 4.0's Chart Wizard makes charting easier. The bad news is that the program has maintained its original charting architecture, which means you can place a chart on a worksheet but must still open the chart in a separate window to edit it.
To ease the chart-building process, ChartWizard guides you through it, step by step, with dialog boxes that provide graphic explanations for each step as well as access to Excel’s help system. If you’ve already mastered Excel’s charting idiosyncrasies, you can bypass ChartWizard by using a fast-forward button. Other useful charting enhancements include a dialog box that lets you view the ranges you’re selecting as you edit a chart’s data scries and the ability to click on 3-D charts and rotate them directly rather than manipulating them through a secondary dialog box.
Also-Rans
In addition to the major enhancements in Excel 4.0, several minor improvements also bear mentioning. You can now create and print reports that consist of multiple worksheet views and scenarios, and a new Print to Fit command lets you print worksheets of a specific size or length. The Crosstab reporting feature makes it easy to summarize data from Excel databases. Excel 4.0's QuickTime support lets you create animated charts from complex data sets. And the Excel 4.0 Software Development Kit (available separately) provides developers with information on how to make use of Excel 4.0’s rich Apple-events support.
Excel s context-sensitive on-line help system is one of the best we’ve seen. After you've selected the help icon on the tool bar, you can click on any object or tool on-screen to call up the appropriate information. Every dialog box is equipped with a Help button, and a search feature makes it easy to find a particular topic. Each topic has a pop-up window with information on shortcuts and special techniques as well as hypertext links to other topics. In addition, you can print any topic and set up bookmarks for subjects you consult frequently. The Back button lets you retrace yoursteps through every one of the topics you’ve viewed. Excel 4.0’s printed documentation is also an improvement — it’s less bulky and is organized into fewer books than version 3.0’s documentation was.
PowerBook users can install on-line help and leave the documentation at home. The help file’s massive size — 1,657K — is the only drawback. Moreover, if you install everything Excel 4.0 offers, you'll need nearly 9 megabytes of storage!
Microsoft's extensive usability testing has clearly paid off — Excel 4.0's near-flawless interface design is proof positive of its effectiveness. However, we still have a few items on our wish list. Many of Excel 4.0’s new features are implemented through add-ins, which must load and configure themselves before you can execute them. As a result, response is sluggish for some commands. We hope future versions will be smarter about which add-ins to preload at launch. We’d also like to see the addition of a macro compiler or tokenizer, which would improve the execution speed of complex macros.
The Bottom Line
We applaud Microsoft for eschewing the features war in favor of making Excel 4.0 easier and more comfortable to use than previous versions. The AutoFormat and AutoFill time-savers alone should significantly boost users’ productivity, Moreover, it may he safe to assume that Microsoft has turned its attention more to attracting new users to spreadsheet programs than to stealing its competitors’ customers. If that’s so, then chalk one up for the Redmond usability team. If you’ve never used a spreadsheet program before and you’re looking to get the most power for your money. Excel 4.0 is an excellent choice. If you’re already an Excel user, you won't want to skip this upgrade.
Benjamin, Louis E. Jr. (September 1992). Microsoft Excel 4.0. MacUser. (pgs. 56-57).
Microsoft Corporation
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Excel_4.0.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
