What features would you like to see Excel develop?

[BaseCase]

Hi everyone,


I am currently reviewing Excel for a current project and need to include a part about features that Excel lacks in terms of presentation capabilities. I would love to hear your thoughts on this!


Many thanks!


Rebecca, Marketing Assistant at BaseCase

 

[Ken Puls]

Wow... that's a big question...

I'm not sure this exactly meets what you're after, but I really wish that Excel did a better job of recommending and creating effective charts by default. Currently the charts made need to be customized to fit with best practices (removing a lot of unnecessary elements), and there aren't really good recommendations to push users toward using the RIGHT chart to display your data. (Hence all those pie/donut charts out there.)

I'd like to see more customizability in the icon sets, allowing me to upload my own that are applicable to my business (and allow things like green down arrows and red up arrows, where only the opposite is possible now.)

The ability to load a map of my property into Excel and plot my data on it would be cool too. For example I'd like to graphically represent the sales prices of real estate lots on a topographical map. Although I think I know the answer, it would be interesting to see how altitude and view lines affect sales price. Likewise, what areas on our golf course attract most business from our beverage carts. We had mapping in Excel 97 as I recall, but I unfortunately didn't have data that I could use with the feature. Now I do and the feature isn't there.

Hopefully that gets the discussion started.

 

[BaseCase]

Hey Ken!

Thanks for your reply! I am interested to know people opinions because I recently graduated from a business school and I kept coming across the same issues with Excel in terms of presentation....

- Lack of animation
- There was no updates to graphs when I changed the underlying data which meant I needed to go back and re-produce the graph
- Integration into presentation tools was so limited. If I needed to go back to find data then I would have to leave my presentation tool to go and look for the underlying data which looked totally unprofessional in front of the audience.
- I felt the same, there were no recommendations from Excel as to which graphs would be present the information I was trying to present. It would have been nice to have more support in this area.

Well, that's all I can think of for the moment, but I am really interested to learn more about what others have to say!