Microsoft Excel Review: What’s New in Excel 2024?

Love them or hate them, spreadsheets are an important 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 apps because, well, it’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 the Mac, but at the moment Excel feels strangely free of it. Sure, it’ll probably come in the future, but for now it’s a relatively old-fashioned experience — and that’s not really a bad thing for many of us.

From building a variety of charts to feed into a Powerpoint via OneDrive, to less intense household plans and math homework, Excel is flexible and scalable – but perhaps not worth the price alone, as Numbers does much of the same.

First impression

Excel makes a very strong first impression, but it is quite identical to other Microsoft Office apps. You can open a blank sheet of paper, dig through your OneDrive files, or choose a template.

These templates are capable of covering pretty much anything you might need, from rent payments to a task manager and timesheets, and when you open any of them, you’ll find them already filled in with the necessary formulas. It’s especially nice if, like me, you’ve struggled with them before.

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

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. First, as 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.

But if you only want to buy Excel, you can do that too. Microsoft sells a lifetime license for Excel for $179.99/£159.99 (one unit).

Microsoft Excel functions

Foundry

Much of what Excel does so well hasn’t changed in years. It’s still an amazingly powerful tool for quick sums all the way up to complex equations, but one thing I was particularly surprised about 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 heavy calculations in the background while you do something else, you can tell it , that it must use fewer cores at the cost of taking longer. It’s a nice trick, although I will say that in my testing on an M3 MacBook Air, I didn’t need to throttle the cores.

You can still take a picture of a printed data table and drop it into your Excel sheet using your iPhone, but in my test of the Mac version you have to save it as a file first.

Microsoft Excel annoyances

Foundry

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

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