Excel 2016 for Mac brings lots of welcome improvements to the workhorse spreadsheet but also leaves out useful tools. Pros Moving to the cloud: Like the other apps in the latest Mac Office suite, Excel 2016 lets you store, sync, and edit files online, via Microsoft's OneDrive cloud storage service. You can also save Excel files to your Dropbox account.

Oct 26, 2018 - How to use Excel Scenarios to store multiple versions of data. Download the sample file and watch the video or follow the written instructions. On the Ribbon's Data tab, click What If Analysis; Click Scenario Manager. XLSTAT is the leading data analysis and statistical solution for Microsoft Excel®. The XLSTAT statistical analysis add-in offers a wide variety of functions to enhance the analytical capabilities of Excel, making it the ideal tool for your everyday data analysis and statistics requirements.

Collaborate: Excel 2016, through OneDrive, lets you share documents with colleagues and collaborate in real time. You can chat online as well, either through a document chat window or through Skype. Modern design: The redesigned ribbon for the Mac version of Excel borrows the look and feel of its Windows counterpart, presenting tools and formatting options in much the same way as Excel for Windows does.

Excel also recommends appropriate charts based on spreadsheet data. Moving across platforms: Excel 2016 supports many of the Windows keyboard shortcuts and most of the Excel 2013 for Windows functions, which should make it easier to use the tool across platforms. The update also includes an Analysis ToolPak add-in, PivotTable slicers for analyzing data, and an improved formula builder. Cons Macro limits: Prior to Office 2016, you could build macros in Excel for Mac.

The 2016 edition offers what Microsoft calls a 'simplified' Visual Basic Editor (VBE), which allows you to debug existing macros. But if you want to build new macros, you need to do that on the Windows side or use an earlier Mac version. For those who built macros in preceding Mac editions, this is a big loss. Bottom Line Excel 2016 is probably worth the upgrade just based on its ability to take advantage of OneDrive. The new analysis tools and formula builder help keep Microsoft's spreadsheet an essential tool.

Hobbling its macros tool, however, diminishes a bit of the attraction for serious users. More Resources. With the new features in Excel, you'll be telling your data's story in no time. Charts, graphs, keyboard shortcuts and data entry enhancements (like formula builder and autocomplete) immediately make you more productive.

And support for Excel 2013 (for Windows) functions ensures that you can easily share files across platforms. The new Analysis ToolPak offers a wide range of statistical functions, including moving averages and exponential smoothing, and PivotTable Slicers help you cut through large volumes of data to find patterns that answer questions.

One often overlooked feature of Excel is the What-If Analysis tool that allows you to explore different scenarios without changing the values in your spreadsheet. This function is particularly useful for economics and management majors as well as business owners because you can see how different values affect models, formulas, and projected profits. Excel’s What-If Analysis Tool Suppose you own a small business selling widgets and you have determined that you will make a $10 profit for each widget you sell. To figure your profit from selling these widgets, you create a worksheet in Excel that looks like this: Notice that the figure in cell A3 represents the number of widgets sold and the figure in B3 represents the profit per widget sold. The figure in C3 was calculated with the following formula: =A3*B3 and represents the profit from selling 1 widget at a $10 profit.

However, you may be interested in your total profit at different numbers of widgets sold. Suppose, for example, you want to know what your profit would be if you sold 100, 200, or 300 widgets. One way to do this is to change the figure in A3 for each of the scenarios we identified above. In other words, you could change A3 to 100 and note the change in profit in C3. You could then do the same for 200 and 300.

However, Excel’s What-If Analysis function was designed for just such an occasion. To use Excel’s What-If Analysis tool, begin by clicking on the Data tab on the Ribbon and locating the What-If Analysis tool button under the Data Tools section. Click on the What-If Analysis button and choose Scenario Manager from the list of options. You should now be looking at the Scenario Manager window. Click on the Add button and Excel asks you to name the first scenario.

You can choose any name you want but it would be prudent to choose one that is descriptive of the scenario you are creating. Free software for mac downloads. For our example here, name the scenario 100 Widgets. In the Changing Cells box, type in A3 and then click the OK button. In the Scenarios Values window that opens, type in 100 and click the OK button. Essentially what you have done is created a new what-if scenario that will calculate the total profit if the number of widgets sold in A3 were 100.