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* Microsoft Corp.'s Excel 5.0 delivers revamped and entirely new features that aid in ease of use and general spreadsheet potency, according to beta testers. Performance and installation are acceptable, they added, even though program files now consume as much as 30M bytes of hard disk space.
* Excel 5.0, originally slated for release last October, is finally about to hit the streets. And, according to the evaluators assisting in this survey, it could be quite an overhaul.
According to evaluators, the new version of Excel includes Pivot Tables for data modeling, a three-dimensional spreadsheet function with notebook tabs for spreadsheet consolidation, a vastly improved macro language based on Microsoft's Visual Basic, TipWizards, which collect user actions and then suggest better ways of doing the same thing, and many other enhancements. Together, these features add up to much-improved ease of use, evaluators said.
The evaluators included systems and business staffers at a major U.S. bank, a military agency, a food products company and a consultancy. All had been beta users of Excel 5.0 for two to four months and had been Excel users for periods of one to five years. In addition, all said they were either current or past users of Lotus Development Corp.'s 1-2-3.
RELIABILITY
Evaluators said Excel 5.0's reliability has improved with each new beta version. They said there were no reliability problems...