Expert rating
Benefits
- Included as part of Office subscription
- Ideal for just about any financial management
- Well linked to OneDrive
Our verdict
Excel is a fantastic spreadsheet application, capable of processing large amounts of data with ease, but it's missing arguably its biggest recent feature added to the Mac. Still, it's packed with features and is ideal for anyone already using the Office and OneDrive apps.
Price when reviewed
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Best price today
Price when reviewed
Lifetime license, one device: $179.99; Microsoft 265 Personal, one device: $99.99 per year ($9.99 per month)
Best prices today:
Microsoft (one device, one year)
$99.99
Microsoft (lifetime license)
$179.99
Love them or hate them, spreadsheets are a key part of the business world, but even with the rise of Google Sheets and the like, there's a good chance your work relies on Microsoft's apps Office because, well, that's how it goes. years.
We've already covered Word 2024 and PowerPoint 2024 and how both are starting to rely on Microsoft's AI tools, even on the Mac, but right now Excel seems oddly free of that. Of course, this will probably happen in the future, but for now, it's a relatively old experience – and that's not really a bad thing for many of us.
From creating a multitude of charts to embed in a Powerpoint via OneDrive to family financial plans and less intense math homework, Excel is flexible and scalable – but may not be worth the price on its own, as Numbers does pretty much the same thing.
First impressions
Models: Excel can answer almost any number-based request you can throw at it.
Foundry
Excel makes a very strong first impression, but it's pretty identical to other Microsoft Office applications. You can open a blank sheet, browse your OneDrive files, or choose a template.
These templates are capable of covering just about anything you might need, from paying roommates' rent to a task manager to timesheets, and once you open one of them , you will find them already filled with the required forms. This is especially nice if, like me, you've had difficulty with them in the past.
As with other applications in the Microsoft suite, Excel's interface is much more cluttered than Numbers, Apple's alternative. It's full of icons and toolbars, whereas Apple has a sort of sliding bar on the right when needed. If you're used to it, great, but it can be intimidating.
The numbers may have the upper hand in terms of looks, but it's the broader Office365 suite that makes Excel part of a more compelling whole. On the one hand, like with Powerpoint, you might not consider signing up for a spreadsheet app on its own, but since it's included in a robust set of apps, why wouldn't you consider Excel ?
For one user, it's $99.99/£84.99 per year ($9.99/£8.49 per month) for Microsoft 265 Personal. Or for $129.99/£104.99 per 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 purchase Excel, you can do that too. Microsoft sells a lifetime license of Excel for $179.99/£159.99 (one device).
Features of Microsoft Excel
Calculation Settings: Excel can use as many CPU cores as you want.
Foundry
Much of what Excel does so well hasn't really changed in years. It's still an incredibly powerful tool for doing quick sums up to complex equations, but one thing that particularly surprised me is hidden in the settings.
This is because Excel lets you decide how many processor cores on your computer it can use to process data, meaning that if you want it to run difficult calculations in the background while you do something else, you You can tell it to use fewer cores at the cost of it taking longer. It's a neat trick, although I will say that in my testing on an M3 MacBook Air, I didn't need to lower the cores.
You can still take a photo of a printed data table and drop it into your Excel sheet using your iPhone, but in my testing on the Mac version, you have to save it as a file first .
The disadvantages of Microsoft Excel
New from Template: Copilot is absent, but there are many interesting templates to simplify the use of Excel.
Foundry
Less of an annoyance than a surprising omission, Microsoft's Copilot features for Excel just aren't there on the Mac – at least as far as I can tell from digging around.
If you are on Windows, Copilot can help you analyze data with its own window, but on Mac this option does not exist. If you don't need AI, that's not a problem, but for now it might just help make Numbers a better candidate if you need it, since it has Apple Intelligence and is related to ChatGPT.
Should you buy Excel 2024 for Mac?
If you don't need AI and are already in the Office365 subscription ecosystem, you'll find plenty to like about Excel, but you'll feel like you're treading water until Microsoft can port to Copilot.
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