Walt Mossberg on Excel 2007

The Wall Street Journal's Walt Mossberg weighed in on Office 2007 in his January 4, 2007 Personal Technology column. This is about as nice of a review that Walt could write for a Microsoft product, but I think he completely missed the boat on several fronts.

I am guessing Walt uses Word daily and never goes into Excel.

The real story in Excel 2007 is the 1.1 million rows. That is 17 Billion cells, and that is just on Sheet 1!. Microsoft changed the way they access memory so you can actually build a fast pivot table based on a million rows and experience fast response times. There are a dozen other great features in Excel 2007, but the 1.1 million rows is the real story.

Walt completely misses this fact. In his review he even suggests changing your settings to save files in the old Office 2003 format, a format which BLOCKS access to rows 65,537 through 1,048,576. Bad move.

Walt has many nice things to say about the ribbon. You can do some commands now in 2-3 clicks instead of 14 clicks in Office 2003.

But he says the menu changes could have people annoyed at best, and furious at worst. Walt was "cursing the program for weeks" trying to find commands. Come on, Walt. Yes - it is annoying on day 1. Yes - the Pivot Table command should be on the Data tab and not the Insert tab. But as Jerry Pournelle pointed out, once you find an item once, you realize it is in a logical place and you will be able to find it again quickly. For the people who have never discovered more than 5% of Excel, the Ribbon will let them find features easily. For the Excel gurus, all of the old keyboard shortcuts, even the ones to access the non-existent menu items, still work.

I wouldn't let them install Office 2007 on your machine on the day you have a critical deadline due. Wait until you are done closing the books for the month. After a couple of days of solid use, you will be able to find your way around the ribbon.

Excel 2007 hits store shelves on January 30, 2007.