Unleashing the power of free Microsoft Excel online
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While it could be said I am biased in my opinion, the critical nature of Microsoft Excel to consumers, small businesses, corporates, enterprises, governments, industries is undeniable. Just do a search on “The importance of Microsoft Excel” (I even hyperlinked it for you here), and you will be presented with countless examples of how finance, pharma, education and students, all sorts of people rely on it in their day to day actions.
In my early days as a developer, I was quite often contracted to build and develop complex excel macros, one such example was to help plot the price of electricity generation to predict consumer pricing every second. In fact my good friend Leila Gharni has entire channel that talks about this and other capabilities of Excel shown below.
Simply put, having excel skills and being able to apply them unlocks a whole world that enables you to use data to tell your story.
I have to pay for Excel though right?
This is a common misconception, many people assume that you have to pay to be able to use Excel. Well yes and no… if you want the complete and extensive feature set that Excel can offer, then yes you would require a license, however, the free version available to everyone is incredibly capable in terms of its features and what you can do with it. It is in this space, I want to share with you some of my favorite things you can do in the free version of Microsoft Excel at Office.com.
Getting a head start using templates
Templates are a great way to get started on your journey with Excel, they are well designed and have integrated the intelligence to start getting value form the information you put in right away with formulas already written. If you are just starting out and want to get insights in to how you can use formulas for calculations on things like savings, time calculations etc, you will find a template that you can use. On the front page alone there are 22 well defined templates to get you up and running, some simple and some more complex to get the most from the data you use.
A well stocked set of tools
From a brief inspection, the difference between the ribbons in the free Excel version and the desktop version for the most common users would be minimal. Most of the core things that a user would want or need are readily available from a formatting, data validation and graphing point of view. To say you could get away with using the free version to cover you for most requirements would not be a great leap of faith. In fact section by section you can see all the major areas are duplicated from Home to View.
The power of Excel data types
To say that I love this feature is an understatement, I REALLY LOVE EXCEL DATA TYPES, and I love to demonstrate its power to everyone who would listen to me.
An Excel data type is something that is created by Excel upon recognition of the data being input, and then opens up a plethora of related data to what you have input. While the Excel desktop application has a more comprehensive collection of data types you can use, Excel online makes available two. Don’t be mistaken though, these two data types are incredibly useful, they are the Stocks and Geography data type.
In my demonstration of this feature, I love to ask people… “How would you find out the GDP of your home country?”, typically they will tell me Google. Then I will ask them, “How would you then find out the fertility rate of the same country?”, they will say again Google. Finally I would ask, “How would you find out the size of your armed forces?”, “Google Matt, Google!” they would cry in frustration. With a smile, I then ask them, “Could you answer all those questions in less than five seconds?”, most will look bemused, and will say they could not, upon which my response is, “Let me show you how excel can do it.”
The way this capability works is that it uses Bing in the background to search the data that is related to the information that, you can read a lot more behind this on the Microsoft Support site. All of this data is live too, a good way to see this it to use the Stock data type for a few stocks, set this up and then hit the data refresh button to see data live.
Formulas for the win
Excel wouldn’t be excellent without the comprehensive support of the formulas you can use for data calculation, and even in the free version it doesn’t come up short. From simple SUM() formulas to complicated statistical and engineering formulas they are all there.
Now in testing, I don’t think all the formulas will work, while some of the complex ones like FISHER, or BETA.INV will work fine, some like STOCKHISTORY don’t work in the free version, and will result in an error indicated as #BLOCK. That being said, the majority of what you need to use should be well covered.
Data visualizations are the real deal
The visualizations in Excel Online don’t just cover the basics, they also cover more advanced ways to view the data you want to share including things like Waterfall, Funnels etc.
I love the Sunburst chart, its a great way to be able to represent multiple levels of data that are inter-related, such as the example below which shows stock levels of fruit in different stores.
The comprehensive nature of charting options is incredible for free and should easily apply from the basics to the advanced workloads.
Keeping a track of all the things you have done
The last thing I want to touch on, is the ability to keep a comprehensive track of the changes, versions and interactions with others in the spreadsheet, just because you are working free doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have robust tools in this area.
Excel online has some great features for this such as
- Version History (found in the File menu): This will enable you to not only see the versions of the file you have been working on, but will also give you a play by play of each change made in the worksheet.
- Show Changes (found in the Review menu): This will enable you to see in a task pane on the right of screen the same change by change history in your workbook like the version history, but you can also change a filter to just look at changes in a specific worksheet or specified range. You can also just right click on a cell on the worksheet and select Show Changes an it will be specific to the cell or range selected.
- Comments (found by right clicking a cell, a range, or clicking the button in the top left): This will enable you to, well… comment about something you have done, and use the @ to tag som
- eone who you might be collaborating with.
- Manage Protection (found under the Review tab): This enables you to lock the cells in your spreadsheet, which is incredibly valuable if you want to prevent someone from changing any of your formulas or calculations, and limit their inputs to specific cells.
You get more than what you pay for!
In wrapping up this brief exploration of the free version of Excel online, considering the cost is zero (ok apart from setting up a Microsoft ID for access), you can get not just incredible value, but incredible power to take the data you collect and use it for analysis to drive massive insights. If you dont have a license for Excel, or Office 365, don’t think you are missing out or limited, what is available for free, is very very capable and I encourage you to give it a go at https://www.office.com.
