Microsoft Excel 2003

Office Excel 2003 is a superb tool for working with figures. Once your data is in Excel, it is easy to perform calculations, analyse results and create charts and reports. An Excel formula can use any of hundreds of functions, covering statistics, finance, mathematics, engineering and database access. Fire up the chart wizard, and you can present data in one of hundreds of chart types, or create your own customised chart. Another important feature is what-if analysis. You can create scenarios using different assumptions, and switch between them to discover how they impact other figures, or use the Solver tool to discover what values you need to input to achieve a desired result. Pivot charts and pivot tables let you view the same data in many different ways, for example viewing sales by region, by salesperson, by quarter, or by product category. Office Excel 2003 can also be used as a development platform. It includes Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) and almost every part of Excel can be manipulated programmatically, either from VBA or from external applications.

Office Excel 2003 includes a new object called a List. Somewhat like a spreadsheet within a spreadsheet, a List has its own headings and data which you can manage, update and share independent of other data in the worksheet. Another new feature is Information Rights Management, which lets you restrict access to specified individuals, allowing either full control or read-only viewing. It must be used with care, since it requires a Rights Management Server and recipients need either Excel or an Excel viewer, but could be useful for sensitive data. Office Excel 2003 also has much improved XML support, enabling data to be structured according to a custom schema, or parsed and modified by any external application that can work with XML.

Spreadsheets are phenomenally useful, and Office Excel 2003 is a mature product that has the lion's share of the market. It is at the heart of Microsoft's Office suite, and benefits from the familiar Office appearance as well as shared tools like spell checking and drawing. --Tim Anderson

Take advantage of data wherever it exists. Microsoft Office Excel 2003 can read data in any customer-defined XML schema without reformatting. You can analyze and manipulate XML data sources using charts, tables, or graphs.*
Develop your own data solutions.
Experienced Excel users can use the new visual XML mapping tool to map a user-specified XML schema to fields in an Excel spreadsheet.
Interact with business systems.
Developers can build document-based solutions that take advantage of the XML support in Microsoft Office Excel 2003. For example, they can program task panes to display relevant tasks and information to help automate business processes.
Work together better
Save Microsoft Office Excel 2003 spreadsheets to shared workspaces where other team members can get the latest version and save task lists, related files, links, and member lists. Shared workspaces require Microsoft Windows Server 2003 running Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services.
Edit lists in Windows SharePoint Services.
Integration with Windows SharePoint Services allows you to compose lists in Excel spreadsheets and transfer them to Windows SharePoint Services sites for easier editing. You can edit the lists in Excel or on the Windows SharePoint Services site.
Control distribution of your work.
Help protect company assets by preventing recipients from forwarding, copying, or printing important spreadsheets using information rights management (IRM) functionality. You can grant others permission to view, review, or modify your spreadsheet, and you can set an expiration date, after which others cannot view or change. IRM functionality requires Windows Server 2003 running Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services (RMS).**
Stay focused on your work.
Find facts easily without leaving Excel by using the new Research task pane. It brings electronic dictionaries, thesauruses, and online research sites into Excel to help you find information and incorporate information into your spreadsheets. Some functionality in the Research task pane requires a connection to the Internet.
Go mobile.
If you own and use a Tablet PC, you can use digital ink markup to annotate Excel 2003 spreadsheets in your own handwriting using a pen input device. You can take notes or send comments to others.
*Note In all Office 2003 Editions, Excel 2003 spreadsheets can be saved in a native XML file format which can be manipulated and searched using any program that can process industry standard XML. With Microsoft Office Professional Edition 2003, companies can also use customized XML formats—or schemas—to enable easier and more advanced information creation, capture, exchange, and reuse.
**Note With Office Professional 2003, you can use Excel to create IRM-protected spreadsheets and grant others permission to access and modify your spreadsheets. You can also apply policy templates to IRM-protected spreadsheets you create. With Microsoft Office Standard Edition 2003, you can read IRM-protected spreadsheets; with permission, you can modify them as well.
Improved Features
Analyze data better. Excel builds on its commitment to reliable and accurate numerical analysis with enhancements in collinearity detection, calculations of sum of squared deviations, normal distributions, and continuous probability distribution functions.
Customize functionality with enhanced smart tags.
Smart tags in Excel are more flexible. Associate smart tag actions with a specific section of a spreadsheet and have the smart tag appear only when you hover the mouse over the associated range of cells.
Find the help you need.
From the Getting Started and Help task panes, you can access Microsoft Office Online Assistance on the Microsoft Office Online Web site. It provides help and assistance articles that are updated regularly from requests and issues of other users. Some functionality in these task panes requires a connection to the Internet.