Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a commercial word processor designed by Microsoft. It was first released in 1983
under the name Multi-Tool Word for Xenix systems. Subsequent versions were later written for several other platforms including IBM PCs running DOS (1983), the Apple Macintosh(1984), the AT&T Unix PC (1985), Atari ST (1986), SCO UNIX, OS/2, and Microsoft Windows(1989). It is a component of the Microsoft Office software system; it is also sold as a standalone product and included in Microsoft Works Suite. The current versions are Microsoft Word 2010 for Windows and 2011 for Mac.

Introduction: Usage
Microsoft Word (or MS Word) is one of the most widely used word-processing programs. Wordprocessor programs primarily allow users to create and edit text documents. Typical use may include writing an essay or report, creating a resume, or writing notes. In addition, work can be presented in the form of inserted tables, diagrams or pictures.

Basic functions
The most basic function of MS Word is to create a document/file. Once a document has been created, the user may enter data - for example by typing some text. At any point after the document has been created, the user is allowed to save the contents. The document can then be accessed at a later time and modified as necessary. Documents can be printed out at any stage in this process.

Creating a new document

As mentioned above, this operation is performed when the user desires to begin a new document. Upon starting MS Word, a new blank document is automatically generated. You may begin typing text on the white space.

Bullets and numbering

Word has extensive list bullets and numbering feature used for tables, list, pages, chapters, headers, footnotes, and tables of content. Bullets and numbering can be applied directly or using a button or by

applying a style or through use of a template. Some problems with numbering have been found in Word 97-2003. An example is Word's system for restarting numbering. The Bullets and Numbering system has been significantly overhauled for Office 2007, which is intended to reduce the severity of these problems. For example, Office 2007 cannot align tabs for multi-leveled numbered lists. Often, items in a list will be inexplicably separated from their list number by one to three tabs, rendering outlines unreadable. These problems cannot be resolved even by expert users. Even basic dragging and dropping of words is usually impossible. Bullet and numbering problems in Word include: bullet characters are often changed and altered, indentation is changed within the same list, bullet point or number sequence can belong to an entirely different nest within the same sequence

WordArt
WordArt enables drawing text in a Microsoft Word document such as a title, watermark, or other text, with graphical effects such as skewing, shadowing, rotating, stretching in a variety of shapes and colors and even including three-dimensional effects, starting at version 2007, and prevalent in Office 2010. Users can apply formatting effects such as shadow, bevel, glow, and reflection to their document text as easily as applying bold or underline. Users can also spell-check text that uses visual effects, and add text effects to paragraph styles.

Saving a document
Once progress has been made on your document, you should save the contents. This will allow you to retrieve it at a later time, and also protect your work from being lost in cases of computer malfunction. To save a document, click the 'File' on the menu bar located at the top of the page. Then, click 'Save'. If it is the first time you are saving the document, a window will pop-up, prompting you to name the document. This pop-up window also allows you to choose the location to which the file will be saved. Once you have entered the desired name, click on the 'Save' button at the bottom right corner of the popup window. The document is now saved under the entered name. For all subsequent saves, the pop-up window will not appear. Upon clicking 'File' and then 'Save', the document will be saved.

Close' file function

Once you have finished your work, and want to end the session, you must close the active document. This is accomplished by clicking on 'File' and then on 'Close'. This will immediately close the file if it has been saved. If the file has not been saved (or changes to the file have been made since the last time it was saved), a pop-up window will appear prompting you to either save the document; discard the most recent changes; or abort the 'close file' operation.

Open' file function

To access a file that has already been created (and subsequently saved), the user must 'open' the file. Upon starting MS Word, click on 'File' and then 'Open'. A window will pop-up prompting you to select the file you desire to access. Click on the file you want to access (it should become highlighted). Then click on the 'Open' button located in the bottom right corner of the window. This will retrieve the selected file and display it on screen.

Save As' function

If you want to make revisions to a document, but retain the original version, you may make use of the 'Save As' function. For example, you may open the file 'essay' and make revisions to it, and then save the revised version as 'essay revised'. The original file ('essay') will be unchanged. If you go to 'File' and click 'Save As', a pop-up window similar to the one shown above will appear. Enter a file name that is different to the original name, and click the 'Save' button.

Printing your document

As mentioned earlier, at any point after you have created a document, you may print out its contents. To print, click on 'File' and then on 'Print'. A pop-up window will appear. Once you have entered the required parameters (see below), click on the 'Ok' button located at the bottom right corner of the window. If you do not want to print out the entire document, you may enter a page range that you want to print. For example typing 1-4,6 will print out pages1,2,3,4, and 6.

You may preview the print out before actually printing. This is useful when one wants to check for problems in the layout of the document. To preview, first click on 'File' and then on 'Print Preview'. This will change the screen view to whole page, where you can view the page exactly as it will appear once printed. After you have viewed each individual page, click on the 'Close' button located at the top of the window. After making any required changes, you may once again preview and then print out the document.

Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft PowerPoint, usually just called PowerPoint, is a commercialpresentation program developed by Microsoft. It is part of the Microsoft Office suite, and runs on Microsoft Windows and Apple's Mac OS X operating system. The current versions are Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 for Windows and 2011 for Mac.

A New And User

Intuitive Interface

Office PowerPoint 2007 has a new, intuitive user interface called the Microsoft Office Fluent user interface, which helps you create better presentations much more quickly than you could in earlier versions of PowerPoint. Office PowerPoint 2007 offers new and improved effects, themes, layouts, and enhanced formatting options that you can use to create great-looking, dynamic presentations in a fraction of the time that you used to spend. You can: Find features and commands in intuitively categorized tabs and related groups. Save time and create better presentations when you select easily accessible formatting options from galleries of predefined Quick Styles, layouts, table formats, effects, and more. Take advantage of the live preview feature to review your formatting choices before you apply them.

The following illustration shows an example of the Ribbon, a component of the Office Fluent user interface.

1. 2. 3. 4.

Tabs are designed to be task-oriented. Groups within each tab break a task into subtasks. Command buttons in each group carry out a command or display a menu of commands.

Themes And Quick Styles

Office PowerPoint 2007 comes with new themes, layouts, and Quick Styles that offer you a wide range of options when you are formatting your presentations. In the past, formatting a presentation took more time because you had to choose the color and style options individually for your tables, charts, and graphics and make sure that they matched one another. Themes simplify the process of creating professional presentations. Just select the theme that you want, and PowerPoint 2007 does the rest. With one click, the background, text, graphics, charts, and tables all change to reflect the theme that you select, ensuring that all elements in your presentation complement one another. And best of all, you can apply the same theme to a Microsoft Office Word 2007 document or Microsoft Office Excel 2007 worksheet that you apply to your presentation. After you apply a theme to your presentation, the Quick Style galleries change to adapt to that particular theme. As a result, any new SmartArt graphics, tables, charts, WordArt, or text that you insert into the presentation automatically match your existing theme. With consistent theme colors, all of your materials can look consistent and professional.

Custom Slide Layouts

With Office PowerPoint 2007, you are no longer confined to prepackaged layouts. You can now create your own custom layouts that can contain as many placeholders as you want; elements such as charts, tables, movies, pictures,SmartArt graphics, and clip art; and even multiple slide master sets with custom layouts for different slide topics. You can also now save the layouts that you customize and create for future use.

Designer-Quality Graphics

Smartart

In the past, you may have had to hire a professional designer to create designer-quality diagrams and charts. The diagrams that you received from the designer, however, were saved as images that you could

not edit. Now, with SmartArt graphics, you can create editable illustrations of your information in an Office PowerPoint 2007 presentation simply and without the aid of a professional designer. You can add stunning visual effects to your SmartArt graphics, shapes, WordArt, and charts, including threedimensional (3-D) effects, shading, reflections, glows, and more.

New And Improved Effects

You can add effects like shadow, reflection, glow, soft edges, warp, bevel, and 3-D rotation to shapes, SmartArt graphics, tables, text, and WordArt in your Office PowerPoint 2007 presentations. You no longer have to hire a designer to create these effects for you. Instead, you can use professional, easy-tomodify effects yourself directly in PowerPoint.

New Text Options

You can create professional-looking presentations with a wide range of text formatting features, including text wrapping within a shape, text in columns or running vertically down a slide, and paragraph-level rulers. You can also now select discontinuous text.

New character styles provide you with more text choices. In addition to all of the standard styles of previous versions of PowerPoint, in Office PowerPoint 2007 you can choose all caps or small caps, strikethrough or double strikethrough, and double or color underline. You can add fills, lines, shadows, glow, kerning, and 3-D effects to your text. By using themes, you can change how your presentation looks with a click of the mouse. You can modify theme fonts, theme colors, and theme effects by choosing a different option. For more information about these text enhancements, see the article Add or delete a fill, outline, or effect for text or WordArt. For more information about themes, see the article Apply a theme to your presentation.

Table And Chart Enhancements

In Office PowerPoint 2007, tables and charts have been redesigned to be much easier to edit and work with. The Ribbon offers many easy-to-find options for editing your tables and charts. The Quick Styles galleries present all of the effects and formatting options that you need to create professionallooking tables and charts. You can cut and paste data, charts, and tables from Microsoft Office Excel 2007 more smoothly than before. With themes, your presentations can now have the same look as your worksheets.

Proofing Tools
The following are some new features of the spelling checker: The spelling checker has been made more consistent across the 2007 Microsoft Office system programs. Examples of this change include the following: Several spelling checker options are now global. If you change one of these options in one Office program, that option is also changed for all the other Office programs. For more information, see the article Choose how spelling and grammar checking work. In addition to sharing the same custom dictionaries, all programs can manage them by using the same dialog box. For more information, see the article Use custom dictionaries to add words to the spelling checker. The 2007 Microsoft Office system spelling checker includes the post-reform French dictionary. In Microsoft Office 2003, this was an add-in that had to be separately installed. For more information, see the articleChoose how spelling and grammar checking work. An exclusion dictionary is automatically created for a language the first time that language is used. Exclusion dictionaries let you force the spelling checker to flag words you want to avoid using. They are handy for avoiding words that are obscene or that don't match your style guide. For more information, see the article Use exclusion dictionaries to specify a preferred spelling for a word. The spelling checker can find and flag some contextual spelling errors. Have you ever typed a mistake similar to the following? I will see you their.In Office PowerPoint 2007, you can enable the Use contextual spellingoption to get help with finding and fixing this type of mistake. This option is available when you check the spelling of documents in English, German, or Spanish. For more information, see the article Choose how spelling and grammar checking work.

Presenter View
By using two monitors, you can run your Office PowerPoint 2007 presentation from one monitor (at a podium, for example) while your audience views it on the second monitor. Presenter view offers the following tools to make it easier for you to present information: You can use thumbnails to select slides out of sequence and create a customized presentation for your audience. Preview text shows you what your next click will add to the screen, such as a new slide or the next bullet in a list. Speaker's notes are shown in large, clear type so that you can use them as a script for your presentation.

You can black out the screen during your presentation and then resume where you left off. For example, you might not want to display the slide content during a break or a question and answer period.

Share information effectively In previous releases of PowerPoint, large file sizes made it difficult to share content or send presentations through e-mail, and you could not reliably share presentations with people who were using different operating systems. Now, whether you need to share presentations, create approval and review workflows, or collaborate with people online who do not use Office PowerPoint 2007, there are many new ways to share and collaborate with others.

Slide Libraries
In Office PowerPoint 2007, you can share and reuse slide content by storing individual slide files in a centrally located Slide Library on a server running Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. You can publish slides from PowerPoint 2007 to a Slide Library, and you can add slides to your PowerPoint presentation from a Slide Library. By storing content in a Slide Library, you reduce the need to re-create content because you can easily repurpose existing content. When you use Slide Libraries, you can ensure that your content is up-to-date by linking slides in your presentation to slides that are stored on the server. If the server version changes, you will be prompted to update your slides.

PowerPoint Xml File Formats

PowerPoint XML file formats are compressed, thus yielding substantially smaller file sizes and reducing the storage and bandwidth requirements. In Open XML Formats, segmented data storage helps you recover corrupted documents, because corruption of one part of a document does not prohibit the remainder of the document from being opened.

Save As Pdf or Xps

Office PowerPoint 2007 supports exporting your file to the following formats: Portable Document Format (PDF) PDF is a fixed-layout electronic file format that preserves document formatting and enables file sharing. The PDF format ensures that when the file is viewed online or printed, it retains exactly the format that you intended, and that data in the file cannot be easily changed.

The PDF format is also useful for documents that will be reproduced by using commercial printing methods. XML Paper Specification (XPS) XPS is an electronic file format that preserves document formatting and enables file sharing. The XPS format ensures that when the file is viewed online or printed, it retains exactly the format that you intended, and that data in the file cannot be easily changed.

Protect and Manage Information

When sharing your presentation with others, you want to be confident that it cannot be accessed by people who should not see it. You also want to make sure that your presentation does not include unintentional content, private information, or editing marks that call out words that the recipient's dictionary does not recognize. Furthermore, you might want to restrict access to the content within your presentation so that potentially sensitive information is not publicly distributed. Office PowerPoint 2007 offers many ways to help you protect and manage your information.

Secure Your Presentations

With a number of new security features in Office PowerPoint 2007, you can help ensure that your presentation is safely managed after it leaves your hands by hiding the author's name, making sure that all comments have been deleted, and restricting who can make changes to it.

Prevent Changes to A Final Version Of A Document

Before you share a final version of your presentation with other people, you can use the Mark As Final command to make the presentation read-only and communicate to other people that you are sharing a final version of the presentation. When a presentation is marked as final, editing commands, proofing marks, and typing are disabled, and people who view the document cannot inadvertently change the document. The Mark As Final command is not a security feature. Anyone can edit a document that is marked as final by turning off Mark as Final.

Find And Remove Hidden Metadata And Personal Information In Documents

Before you share your presentation with other people, you can use the Document Inspector to check the presentation for hidden metadata, personal information, and content that may be stored in the presentation. The Document Inspector can find and remove information like comments, ink annotations, document properties, document management server information, invisible objects, off-slide content, presentation notes, and custom XML data. The Document Inspector can help you ensure that the presentations you share with other people do not contain any hidden personal information or any hidden content that your organization might not want distributed. Additionally, your organization can customize the Document Inspector to add checks for additional types of hidden content. For more information about the Document Inspector, see the article Remove hidden data and personal information from Office documents.

Add a Digital Signature To Your Presentation

You can help provide assurance as to the authenticity, integrity, and origin of your presentation by adding an invisible digital signature to the presentation. Digital signatures provide a record of exactly what was signed, and they allow a signature to be verified in the future.

Information Rights Management

You may need to control who can access company information, especially if you are creating presentations that contain highly confidential information. By using the 2007 Office release with

Microsoft Windows Rights Management Services for Windows Server 2003, you can assign permissions that prevent others from copying, printing, or editing your presentation.

MANAGE DOCUMENT PROPERTIES IN THE DOCUMENT INFORMATION PANEL

The Document Information Panel makes it easy to view and edit document properties while you work on your Office PowerPoint 2007 presentations. The Document Information Panel is displayed at the top of your document in Office PowerPoint 2007. You can use the Document Information Panel to view and edit both standard Microsoft Office document properties and properties for files that are saved to a document management server. If you use the Document Information Panel to edit the document properties for a server document, the updated properties will be saved directly to the server.

Office Diagnostics
Microsoft Office Diagnostics is a series of diagnostic tests that can help you to discover why your computer is crashing. The diagnostic tests can solve some problems directly and may identify ways that you can solve other problems. Microsoft Office Diagnostics replaces the following Microsoft Office 2003 features: Detect and Repair and Microsoft Office Application Recovery.

Program Recovery

Office PowerPoint 2007 has improved capabilities to help you to avoid losing work when the program closes abnormally. Whenever possible, Office PowerPoint 2007 tries to recover some aspects of the state of the program after it restarts. For example, say you are working on several files at the same time. Each file is open in a different window with specific data visible in each window. Office PowerPoint 2007 crashes. When you restart Office PowerPoint 2007, it opens the files and restores the windows to the way they were before Office PowerPoint 2007 crashed.

Operation

PowerPoint presentations consist of a number of individual pages or "slides". The "slide" analogy is a reference to the slide projector. Slides may contain text, graphics, sound, movies, and other objects, which may be arranged freely. PowerPoint, however, facilitates the use of a consistent style in a presentation using a template or "Slide Master". The presentation can be printed, displayed live on a computer, or navigated through at the command of the presenter. For larger audiences the computer display is often projected using a video projector. Slides can also form the basis of webcasts. PowerPoint provides three types of movements: Entrance, emphasis, and exit of elements on a slide itself are controlled by what PowerPoint calls Custom Animations Transitions, on the other hand are movements between slides. These can be animated in a variety of ways Custom animation can be used to create small story boards by animating pictures to enter, exit or move.

Microsoft Office Excel

Microsoft Excel is a commercial spreadsheet application written and distributed by
Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. It has been a very widely applied spreadsheet for these platforms, especially since version 5 in 1993, and it has almost completely replaced Lotus 1-2-3 as the industry standard for spreadsheets. Excel forms part of Microsoft Office. The current versions are 2010 for Microsoft Windows and 2011 for Mac OS X.

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet tool capable of performing calculations, analyzing data and
integrating information from different programs. Microsoft Excel is comprised of organizational units called workbooks. A standard workbook contains worksheets andchart sheets. Worksheets perform calculations, store and organize data, present graphics and controls like a web page; they are extremely versatile. A worksheet in turn is comprised of millions of cells. The job of a cell is to store a formula that performs a calculation or communicates with some other application (i.e. program) such as a database. They also store and present data. A chart sheet's job is to present a chart or graph developed from data stored on a worksheet.

Excel 2007
The most obvious change is a completely revamped user interface called the Ribbon menu system, which means a user must abandon most habits acquired from previous versions. Some practical advantages of the new system are greatly improved management of named variables through the Name Manager, and much improved flexibility in formatting graphs, which now allow (x, y) coordinate labeling and lines of arbitrary weight. The number of rows is now 1,048,576 and columns is 16,384. Several improvements to pivot tables were introduced. Office Open XML file formats were introduced, including .xlsm for a workbook with macros and .xlsx for a workbook without macros. This version makes more extensive use of multiple cores for the calculation of spreadsheets, however VBA macros are not handled in parallel and XLL addins only are executed in parallel if they are thread safe and indicate this at the time of registration.

Basic

Operation

Microsoft Excel has the basic features of all spreadsheets, using a grid of cells arranged in numbered rows and letter-named columns to organize data manipulations like arithmetic operations. It has a battery of supplied functions to answer statistical, engineering and financial needs. In addition, it can display data as line graphs, histograms and charts, and with a very limited three-dimensional graphical display. It allows sectioning of data to view its dependencies on various factors from different perspectives (using pivot tables and the scenario manager[). And it has a programming aspect, Visual Basic for Applications, allowing the user to employ a wide variety of numerical methods, for example, for solving differential equations of mathematical physics, and then reporting the results back to the spreadsheet. Finally, it has a variety of interactive features allowing user interfaces that can completely hide the spreadsheet from the user, so the spreadsheet presents itself as a so-called application, or decision support system (DSS), via a customdesigned user interface, for example, a stock analyzer, or in general, as a design tool that asks the user

questions and provides answers and reports. In a more elaborate realization, an Excel application can automatically poll external databases and measuring instruments using an update schedule, analyze the results, make a Word report or Power Point slide show, and e-mail these presentations on a regular basis to a list of participants. Microsoft allows for a number of optional command-line switches to control the manner in which Excel starts.

Charts
Excel supports charts, graphs or histograms generated from specified groups of cells. The generated graphic component can either be embedded within the current sheet, or added as a separate object. These displays are dynamically updated if the content of cells change. For example, suppose that the important design requirements are displayed visually; then, in response to a user's change in trial values for parameters, the curves describing the design change shape, and their points of intersection shift, assisting the selection of the best design.

Using other Windows Application

Windows applications such as Microsoft Access and Microsoft Word, as well as Excel as can communicate with each other and use each others' capabilities. The most common are Dynamic Data Exchange: although strongly deprecated by Microsoft, this is a common method to send data between applications running on Windows, with official MS publications referring to it as "the protocol from hell". As the name suggests, it allows applications to supply data to others for calculation and display. It is very common in financial markets, being used to connect to important financial data services such as Bloomberg andReuters. OLE Object Linking and Embedding: allows a Windows application to control another to enable it to format or calculate data. This may take on the form of "embedding" where an application uses another to handle as task that it is more suited to, for example a Powerpointpresentation may be embedded in an Excel spreadsheet or vice versa.

Using Esternal Datas

Excel users can access external data sources via Microsoft Office features such as (for example) .odc connections built with the Office Data Connection file format. Excel files themselves may be updated using a Microsoft supplied ODBC driver. Excel can accept data in real time through several programming interfaces, which allow it to communicate with many data sources such as Bloomberg and Reuters. DDE : Dynamic Data Exchange. Uses the message passing mechanism in Windows to allow data to flow between Excel and other applications. Although it is easy for users to create such links, programming such links reliably is so difficult that Microsoft, the creators of the system, officially refer to it as "the protocol from hell".[19] In spite of its many issues DDE remains the most common way for data to reach traders in financial markets.

Network DDE Extended the protocol to allow spreadsheets on different computers to exchange data. Given the view above, it is not surprising that in Vista, Microsoft no longer supports the facility.[20] Real Time Data : RTD although in many ways technically superior to DDE, has been slow to gain acceptance, since it requires non-trivial programming skills, and when first released was neither adequately documented nor supported by the major data vendors

Statistical functions
The accuracy and convenience of statistical tools in Excel has been criticized, as mishandling missing data, as returning incorrect values due to inept handling of round-off and large numbers, as only selectively updating calculations on a spreadsheet when some cell values are changed, and as having a limited set of statistical tools. Microsoft has announced some of these issues are addressed in Excel 2010.

Graphing
The menus related to graphs and graph formatting have been changed completely in Excel 2007. Some common activities in using graphs are less transparent than previously. For example, to add a curve to a graph, one can right click on the graph and choose "select data" from the drop-down menu, or use the "chart tools/design" tab. However, when there are other drop-down menus open, this menu doesn't appear and the "select data" option is grayed out (unavailable) from the toolbar. That facet of the menu system must be "discovered" by the user. These quirks and other nontransparent features contribute to a long learning curve, and to annoyance if one returns to Excel after an absence long enough to forget these little "tricks" of the menu system.

Excel MOD function error

Excel has issues with modulo operations. In the case of excessively large results, Excel will return the error warning #NUM! instead of an answer.

Date problems
Excel includes January 0, 1900 and February 29, 1900, incorrectly treating 1900 as a leap year. The bug originated from Lotus 1-2-3, and was purposely implemented in Excel for the purpose of backward compatibility. This legacy has later been carried over into Office Open XML file format.

Filenames
Microsoft Excel will not open two documents with the same name and instead will display the following error: A document with the name '%s' is already open. You cannot open two documents with the same name, even if the documents are in different folders. To open the second document, either close the document that is currently open, or rename one of the documents.[ The reason is for calculation ambiguity with linked cells. If there is a cell ='[Book1.xlsx]Sheet1'!$G$33, and there are two books named "Book1" open, there is no way to tell which one the user means.

Numeric Precison
Despite the use of fifteen-figure precision, Excel can display many more figures (up to thirty) upon user request. But the displayed figures are not those actually used in its computations, and so, for example, the difference of two numbers may differ from the difference of their displayed values. Although such departures are usually beyond the 15th decimal, exceptions do occur, especially for very large or very small numbers. Serious errors can occur if decisions are made based upon automated comparisons of numbers (for example, using the Excel If function), as equality of two numbers can be unpredictable. In the figure the fraction 1/9000 is displayed in Excel. Although this number has a decimal representation that is an infinite string of ones, Excel displays only the leading 15 figures. In the second line, the number one is added to the fraction, and again Excel displays only 15 figures. In the third line, one is subtracted from the sum using Excel. Because the sum in the second line has only eleven 1's after the decimal, the difference when 1 is subtracted from this displayed value is three 0's followed by a string of eleven 1's. However, the difference reported by Excel in the third line is three 0's followed by a string of thirteen 1's and two extra erroneous digits. Thus, the numbers Excel calculates with to obtain the third line are not the numbers that it displays in the first two lines. Moreover, the error in Excel's answer is not just round-off error. Excel works with a modified 1985 version of the IEEE 754 specification. Excel's implementation involves an amalgam of truncations and conversions between binary and decimal representations, leading to accuracy that sometimes is better than one would expect from simple fifteen digit precision, and sometimes much worse. See the main article for details. Besides accuracy in user computations, the question of accuracy in Excel-provided functions may be raised. Particularly in the arena of statistical functions, Excel has been criticized for sacrificing accuracy for speed of calculation. As many calculations in Excel are executed using VBA, an additional issue is the accuracy of VBA, which varies with variable type and user-requested precision.

File Formats
Microsoft Excel up until 2007 version used a proprietary binary file format called Binary Interchange File Format (BIFF) as its primary format.[50] Excel 2007 uses Office Open XML as its primary file format, an XML-based format that followed after a previous XML-based format called "XML Spreadsheet" ("XMLSS"), first introduced in Excel 2002.[51] Although supporting and encouraging the use of new XML-based formats as replacements, Excel 2007 remained backwards-compatible with the traditional, binary formats. In addition, most versions of Microsoft Excel can read CSV, DBF, SYLK, DIF, and other legacy formats. Support for some older file formats were removed in Excel 2007.[52] The file formats were mainly from DOS based programs.