Microsoft Excel review: What’s new in Excel 2024?

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 leans on Microsoft Office’s apps because, well, that’s just the way it’s been for years.

We’ve already covered Word 2024 and PowerPoint 2024 and how both are starting to lean into Microsoft’s AI tools, even on Mac, but at the moment Excel feels strangely free from that. Sure, it’s likely to come in the future, but for now, it’s a relatively old-school experience — and that’s 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 Impressions

Excel makes a very strong first impression, but it’s 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 you’ll find them already populated with the required formulae. That’s particularly nice if, like me, you’ve struggled with them in the past.

As with the other apps in Microsoft’s suite, Excel’s interface is much more cluttered than Numbers, Apple’s alternative. It’s rammed full of icons and toolbars, whereas Apple has a sort of slide-in bar on the right when it’s needed. If you’re used to it, great, but it can be intimidating.

Numbers may have the upper hand in terms of look and feel, but it’s 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 it’s included in with a robust set of apps, why wouldn’t you consider Excel?

For one user it’s $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 features

Foundry

A lot of what Excel does so well hasn’t really changed in years. It’s 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.

That’s 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. It’s 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 annoyances

Foundry

Less an annoyance and more a surprising omission, Microsoft’s Copilot features for Excel simply aren’t here on Mac — at least as far as I can tell when digging through.

If you’re on Windows, Copilot can help analyze data with its own window, but on Mac there’s no such option. If you don’t need AI, that’s 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 you’re not in need of AI and you’re already in the Office365 subscription ecosystem, you’ll find plenty to like in Excel, but it does feel like it’s treading water until Microsoft can port over Copilot.