The Best Spreadsheet Program on the Market!
August 11, 2021

The Best Spreadsheet Program on the Market!

Josh Collier, Website Designer | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Excel

I use Microsoft Excel for so many things from personal to my small home business to my day job that I am an office manager at. Many times I will just use excel for quick calculations really not even to save the document, but I use it instead of the calculator quite often. I love Excel and am amazed by all the things it can do. I have personally made a custom payroll system to calculate payroll with all of the deductions and taking from one page and calculating to other pages. It was not an amazingly complex payroll system but it worked when you only had a few employees. I have used it to keep track of vacation days and also to keep track of union fees and dues in my day job. Pretty much anything accounting can be used for and it is really fun to be able to have a complex function with multiple lines that takes from many different pages. I love excel and my wife calls me a nerd for it.
  • I think it works really well for making home budgets especially if you are doing like an every dollar system.
  • It can easily be used to make simple invoices when you have a template.
  • Using it when you have said an American Express credit card invoice to break that invoice into the correct departments to be able to add to the correct account in your other accounting software works well.
  • I also use it for calculating my payroll tax.
  • There are probably some integrations from other data sources that pull the info automatically that could come in handy though.
  • There is very little I think it lacks, but I barely touch the surface of what it can do even though I am a decently skilled user.
  • There are some things that are not super complicated accounting documents that I have made with Excel that I use as a template say once a week or once a month and they might save me 20 minutes here and 20 minutes there and so I am able to work on other things I need to do. I can't actually put a number amount on ROI, but it definitely saves me time.
  • Making calculations I know it is not going to be wrong wherewith a desk calculator I may put something in wrong and miss it and at that point, it could cost me money if I calculate tax wrong and have to pay more or didn't charge enough so it allows me to have the template and be consistent every time.
I personally like Excel better than the other two programs I have listed. They are very close to excel but I know where everything is and what all the symbols are in excel where the other ones have some different nuances that take a little bit more time or that I have to figure out. There are really only two reasons I would use the other 2. The first reason is that LibreOffice Calc is totally open source and free so it is cheaper so it is a good alternative if you don't really have any money to get excel and it can be used offline like excel. The reason to use Google Sheets is for one it is free and you can easily collaborate with real-time changes with other people on the document and still not pay anything but you do have to have an internet connection to access and make changes.
If I just needed to do the calculations and not comparing prices and don't need to collab(unless you have 365 then you could) I would for sure use excel.

Do you think Microsoft Excel delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Excel's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Excel live up to sales and marketing promises?

Yes

Did implementation of Microsoft Excel go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Excel again?

Yes

I think really any small accounting things that aren't super complicated, would probably be faster and better to use than many other things. If you have a server that you can share the documents with other work colleagues I think it works very well. Though to have live sharing and changes of documents you need to have Microsoft 365 which is annoying that it is a subscription, where if you have office 2019 you can not do this. So if you don't have 365 Google Sheets may be a better option for making changes at the same time as it is free and close to Excel I just don't like it as well.
Very complicated things like doing payroll for 100 employees is probably not going to be the best thing to do with excel as there are going to be many better alternatives specifically made for that at an ok price.
But I would definitely recommend excel to anyone that has a small business as it is so versatile.