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MacworldAt a glanceExpert's RatingProsIncluded as part of Office subscriptionIdeal for just about any finance managementTied in nicely with OneDriveConsNo Copilot (yet)Our Verdict Excel is a fantastic spreadsheet app, capable of processing large quantities of data with ease, but its missing arguably its biggest recent feature addition on Mac. Still, its absolutely packed with features and is ideal for anyone already using Office apps and OneDrive.Price When ReviewedThis value will show the geolocated pricing text for product undefinedBest Pricing TodayLove them or hate them, spreadsheets are a key part of the business world, but even with the rise of Google Sheets and the like, theres a good chance your work leans on Microsoft Offices apps because, well, thats just the way its been for years.Weve already covered Word 2024 and PowerPoint 2024 and how both are starting to lean into Microsofts AI tools, even on Mac, but at the moment Excel feels strangely free from that. Sure, its likely to come in the future, but for now, its a relatively old-school experience and thats no real bad thing for many of us.From building a whole host of charts to drop into a Powerpoint via OneDrive, to less intense household financial plans and maths homework, Excel is flexible and scalable but perhaps not worth the price alone since Numbers does much of the same stuff.First ImpressionsTemplates: Excel can tackle just about any number-based request you can throw at it.FoundryExcel makes a very strong first impression, but its pretty identical to other Microsoft Office apps. You can open a blank sheet, dig through your OneDrive files, or pick a template.Those templates are able to cover just about anything you may need, from housemate rent payments, to a task manager, and time sheets, and once you open any of them youll find them already populated with the required formulae. Thats particularly nice if, like me, youve struggled with them in the past.As with the other apps in Microsofts suite, Excels interface is much more cluttered than Numbers, Apples alternative. Its rammed full of icons and toolbars, whereas Apple has a sort of slide-in bar on the right when its needed. If youre used to it, great, but it can be intimidating.Numbers may have the upper hand in terms of look and feel, but its the wider Office365 suite that makes Excel part of a more compelling whole. For one, as with Powerpoint, you may not consider signing up to a spreadsheet app on its own, but since its included in with a robust set of apps, why wouldnt you consider Excel?For one user its $99.99/84.99 a year ($9.99/8.49 a month) for Microsoft 265 Personal. Or for $129.99/104.99 a year (or $12.99/10.49 per month) you can get the Microsoft 365 Family edition with up to six licenses including Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and more.However, if you only want to buy Excel you can do that too. Microsoft sells a lifetime license of Excel for $179.99/159.99 (one device).Microsoft Excel featuresCalculation settings: Excel can use as many, or as few, processor cores as youd like.FoundryA lot of what Excel does so well hasnt really changed in years. Its still a fantastically powerful tool for quick sums right up to complex equations, but one thing I was particularly surprised by is hiding in the settings.Thats because Excel lets you decide how many processor cores on your machine it can use to crunch data, meaning if you want it to run difficult calculations in the background while you do something else, you can tell it to use fewer cores at the cost of it taking longer. Its a neat trick, although I will say in my testing on an M3 MacBook Air I had no need for turning the cores down.Still, you can take a picture of a printed data table and drop it into your Excel sheet using your iPhone, but in my testing of the Mac version you need to save it as a file first.Microsoft Excel annoyancesNew from Template: Copilot is absent, but there are plenty of great templates to take the hassle out of using Excel.FoundryLess an annoyance and more a surprising omission, Microsofts Copilot features for Excel simply arent here on Mac at least as far as I can tell when digging through.If youre on Windows, Copilot can help analyze data with its own window, but on Mac theres no such option. If you dont need AI, thats fine, but for the time being that might just help make Numbers a better candidate if you do since it has Apple Intelligence and ties to ChatGPT.Should you buy Excel 2024 for Mac?If youre not in need of AI and youre already in the Office365 subscription ecosystem, youll find plenty to like in Excel, but it does feel like its treading water until Microsoft can port over Copilot.
