A Strong Helper Is Available When Excel Sucks

For many years until today, MS Excel is the most popular spreadsheet software in the world. It’s undeniable that Excel is a very powerful spreadsheet in almost every aspect. With intuitive interface, outstanding computation ability and excellent chart tools, Excel is liked by many people and used in all industries, enterprises in any size and any workspace environment. What a flexible and powerful tool! When it comes to complex computing tasks which are difficult to conduct with common functions of Excel, the powerful VBA will help users to solve them. It sounds that Excel is invincible, right?

Since Excel is so powerful, why do Excel users still need a helper? That’s because Excel’s disadvantages bring a lot of inconvenience. Assuming that if Excel is powerful enough, then there won’t be other spreadsheets tools like Google Docs, OpenOffice, esCalc, etc. Even Brent Frei, the former Microsoft analyst wants to disrupt MS Excel. The best explanation for this is that there is necessity and the shortcomings of Excelcause it unable to meet the requirements. It’s not uncommon to see users’ complaint about Excel in various aspects, such as poor support for structured data, system compatibility, data analyzing (statistical analysis), etc.

The advantages mentioned at the very first beginning of the article are even not the real strengths of Excel. Although Excel is widely used, many people still don’t know how to use it or just use it for data storage and presenting. Why? The most probable reason is that Excel is inefficient for complex data handling. For instance, if you grouped the data and want to filter out the unwanted data with different criteria in each group, you have to filter one by one. If there are hundreds of groups, then the work would be huge and time-consuming. That’s the reason that esCalc, a smarter spreadsheet softwarecomes to users’ sight. It compliments this disadvantage of Excel with its unique multi-level structure.

Users may argue that the above mentioned problems can be resolved by VBA. It’s true if you are good at programing. But how many people are skilled at VBA? Although I don’t have the exact figure, I’m sure that the number of people who know VBA is less than the people who don’t know about VBA. What’s more, how do the users who don’t have VBA skills to conduct complex data calculation? Of course, they can seek help from their IT departments. However it takes time to get results and will lead the company to miss the gold opportunity.

Besides, users have to save the file as an xlsm file if they use VBA in a report. The problem is that macros are not allowed by a lot of people when they open xlsm files. In this case, the macros are useless anyway. Therefore, a helper which can realize this like esCalc is needed. With it, users don’t have to adopt VBA to complete complex computing objects in a simple way. For reports, esCalc has professional reporting functions, including rich landscaping styles, multiple charts, exporting to multiple data formats, page breaking and printing, etc.