Using the Free Version of Excel? You're Missing These 5 Features

Microsoft Excel Online has limited functionality and lacks advanced formulas and charts compared to paid versions. Powerful data analytics tools such as Power Query and Power Pivot are available only in Microsoft 365 subscriptions. Desktop Excel provides more features, better offline experience, higher reliability and more powerful automation capabilities.

The full-featured Microsoft Excel remains the leader in spreadsheets. While the free online version of Excel is suitable for many use cases, it has some key limitations compared to the desktop version.

If you are a business user, or a power user who wants to automate home data tasks such as balancing budgets, or want to get involved in data analytics, you will miss a lot of advanced features (old and new) that are only available in paid versions of Excel Both).

Advanced Formulas and Charts

Free Version Microsoft Excel allows you to use only limited formulas and charts that have powered commercial applications for decades and added a lot of color to presentations. Some of the formulas and charts you miss can unlock some very impressive use cases such as XLOOKUP(), UNIQUE(), LET(), FILTER(), and LAMBDA() (the latter allows you to define your own reusable functions ! ).

We can't forget the pivot tables used to summarize and help you analyze your data. It may be the key Excel feature (at least historically), while the free version of Excel only supports basic pivot table features.

Power Query, Power Pivot and Data Analysis Tools

In recent years, data analysis has become a major event for enterprises. Large amounts of customer data can be easily processed and analyzed through an online platform to better understand how to reach a wider audience and how to improve products to better meet their needs (see Growth Marketing for detailed workings).

Excel has been expanded with new tools to meet new data analytics needs. Power Query provides ETL (extract, transform, load) capabilities, which are critical for big data use cases, while Power Pivot provides tools to create complex relationships between data, allowing for deeper analysis. Power Query has limited functionality in the free online version of Excel, and Power Pivot is completely missing.

Offline usage and reliability

Desktop applications are arguably still providing a better user experience than browser-based applications. You can work anywhere, even if your internet connection is not in good condition or no internet connection, perfect for digital nomads, and despite a huge leap in performance for browser-based applications, desktop applications (including Excel) Still has huge performance and functional advantages.

In addition to being more powerful and easier to use, desktop applications also allow you to save data on your own devices. This means there is no limit on the amount of data you want to process, no privacy and security issues for your data (very important for businesses in the era of GDPR, CCPA, and HIPAA). Processing local data also gives you control over the data, allowing you to back up and manage your own data without being affected by cloud storage errors that may cause data to be inaccessible.

Macro and automation

Excel allows you to record macros to play back your actions (repeat the options and keys you recorded) and create Office scripts for automation (although Office scripts are available in Excel Online, you need to pay to use Microsoft 365). In desktop Excel, you can also access more advanced developer and automation features through VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).

Those who have some experience with Excel may feel uncomfortable when they mention VBA, but they will admit that it is still a powerful tool if you know how to use it. VBA allows you to create custom interfaces to take advantage of automation in Excel, and while it is an ugly language that can be difficult to learn, and uses a less intuitive editor, it allows you to do a lot and is worth overcoming. obstacle. One recent improvement is that AI tools for Excel automation and VBA can help you write scripts.

It is always worth pointing out that Microsoft Office macros can pose a network security risk, so you should only open the macro-enabled documents from trusted sources and proofread any code you find online before running.

More data from more places

With desktop version of Microsoft Excel, you can read raw data from CSV files directly from local disk or network (no upload required), allowing you to process large amounts of data. You can also connect to a database server, load data from a JSON format API, or even crawl data from a web page.

Ability to access data from these sources allows you to get data from a large number of analytics and other sources, process it using other tools such as Python, and then continue to improve it in Excel. Plug-ins for desktop Excel are also available for integration with other data sources and tools.

Microsoft Excel still dominates the business world (for better or worse)

Excel has been around for a long time, it is still prevalent in business and education, and despite the increasing competition from new tools, it still manages to thrive in new data analytics use cases. Although some parts have become a little stale and some puzzling UI selection and functionality have lasted for decades (no doubt for compatibility and satisfying deeply rooted users), many still think it is what it does. The best tool (and it's still improving).

If you don't agree with its features, or if you don't use spreadsheets for a reasonable price for a Microsoft 365 subscription, check out our list of Microsoft Excel alternatives, or our best free apps for replacing Microsoft 365 and Adobe subscriptions Program Guide.

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