Thursday, May 16, 2013

Excel or Works: Which Is Best for Home Budgeting?

Microsoft Excel is the gold standard for spreadsheet format.  It is part of the Microsoft Office Suite of peograms since 2008, and is used worldwide by the vast majority of people for its reliability, flexibility, and robust variety of available functions.

Microsoft Works Spreadsheet, on the other hand, has been around since 1987..  It is part of the Microsoft Works Suite of programs and is in its 8th version.  While it offers fewer functions than Excel, it is in my opinion easier to navigate and overall easier to edit, print, and save. 

The functions needed for home spreadsheet budgets are readily available in both programs.  I prefer to use MSWorks for my personal home budgeting, mostly because I am more familiar with its functions and behavior than I am with Excel.  But younger users who have grown up using Excel are probably as unfamiliar with Works as I am with Excel, so they will likely prefer Excel for their home budgeting despite its steeper learning curve for my generation.

With its broader range of functions, Excel has been forced to use a wider ribbon to arrange all its choices, but has compensated for that extra width by allowing the user to expand or minimize its ribbon next to its help button.  Works uses its ribbon rows to divide user choices and is therefore vertically leaner.

Overall I believe the choice of Excel or Works for home budgeting is ultimately the user's preference, as both offer more than sufficient choices for every aspect of editing, saving, and printing files.  Both programs offer current updates and help online and operate with imperceptible differences in speed.  So the only true advantage of one over the other for home budgeting, in my view, is ease of use, how it feels to each user.

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