The UK Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has launched a strategic market status (SMS) investigation into Microsoft’s software licensing practices.

The probe, which the regulator touted in late March, aims to establish whether the tech giant’s position in the market has a negative impact on competition and consumer flexibility.

In a statement announcing the move, the CMA said the probe will primarily focus on business software products used by organisations across the country, including:

• Productivity software
• Personal computer and server operating systems
• Database management systems
• Security software

Microsoft business products, which include Windows, Word, Excel, Teams, and Copilot, are used by hundreds of thousands of firms and public sector organizations across the country, the CMA noted, with more than 15 million commercial users.

The regulator highlighted concerns that UK customers “may not always be able to effectively combine software from Microsoft with that of other providers”. This, it said, could limit their ability to access preferred products at competitive prices.

“The CMA’s investigation will examine whether Microsoft has SMS in business software and consider whether it can use that position to limit customer choice,” the CMA said.

“It will assess whether bundling of products, limits in interoperability or default settings can prevent customers switching and weaken the competitive constraints Microsoft faces from rivals.”

Notably, the CMA said its decision to launch the probe comes in the wake of a previous investigation into the UK cloud services market.

The regulator’s lengthy probe found the dominance of hyperscalers including Microsoft and Amazon Web Services (AWS) had a negative impact on competition in the UK market.

Microsoft has repeatedly faced scrutiny over its software licensing practices. Slack, for example, filed an EU complaint in 2020 amid claims the company had engaged in anticompetitive behavior with Teams bundling practices.

EU-based trade group, Cloud Infrastructure Services Providers in Europe (CISPE), filed a similar complaint in 2022, alleging that Microsoft imposed higher charges for customers running software on rival cloud platforms.

Microsoft and CISPE agreed to a settlement in mid-2025, which was met with criticism by other industry groups.

CMA seeks business feedback

This latest probe into Microsoft practices must be completed within nine months, according to the regulator. A decision on whether to designate the tech giant with strategic market status is expected by February 2027.

In the meantime, the CMA said plans to gauge the thoughts of businesses across the country using Microsoft products, as well as challenger companies, over whether product choices may be limited.

This includes concerns surrounding product bundling, lack of interoperability, and default settings used by the company.

“Our aim is to understand how these markets are developing, Microsoft’s position within them and to consider what, if any, targeted action may be needed to ensure UK organizations can benefit from choice, innovation and competitive prices,” said Sarah Cardell, chief executive of the CMA.

A spokesperson for Microsoft told ITPro: "We are committed to working quickly and constructively with the CMA to facilitate its review of the business software market."

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There can't be many 40-year-old programs still in widespread use, but Microsoft Excel is one of them. Nearly nine-in-ten companies, indeed, use it to run their financial processes.

According to new research, it's not the old stagers that are the biggest fans of the spreadsheet package – it's Gen Z and Millennial workers.

Analysis from Datarails found 40% of finance professionals across the US and UK prefer the spreadsheet software to other options, even ranking it higher than ERP systems at 26% for financial planning.

Accountants were particularly keen, with 57% of respondents citing Excel as their go-to platform.

Enthusiasm for the software varies across generations, however. More than half (54%) of 22-32-year-olds in the CFO’s office said they love Excel, yet that fell to just 39% for both 33-50-year-olds and those older than 51.

"That love comes from experience,” Datarails noted. “83% of younger users spend more than five hours each day in the spreadsheet, falling to only around 70% for older cohorts.”

"In fact, more than one in four (27%) of 22-32-year-olds spend more than seven hours a day in Excel. It essentially occupies their entire workday."

Indeed, 78% of younger pros said they would either decline a job that banned Excel or accept it only grudgingly.

Excel’s importance will live on

Looking ahead, 84% believe Excel will stay just as important or become more important over the next decade, with only 15% predicting a decline.

Among Gen Z and Millennials, however, this figure rises, with 89% of respondents touting the platform’s continued popularity and importance.

"When we asked finance professionals to describe their relationship with Excel, 82% reported high or moderate emotional attachment,” Datarails said.

“But here’s where it gets interesting: 43% describe the relationship as 'love/hate', calling it essential and reliable yet also frustrating and manual," said Datarails.

Notably, only 12% said they outright hate Excel.

What makes Excel so popular?

According to Datarails, Excel has several key plus points. These include its flexibility in building exactly what finance professionals need, and the fact that it’s more or less a ‘universal language’ across finance teams.

There are downsides, however. More than one-quarter (28%) cited data consolidation as their biggest frustration, 23% said they struggle with data entry and updates, 22% pointed to version control and tracking changes, and 14% said they face collaboration challenges.

Elsewhere, Datarails found the biggest downside identified by finance professionals was error management. Almost every respondent noted they’d discovered a material Excel error in their team’s work before it was shared internally.

With regard to improvements, finance professionals said they would like more automated data consolidation while maintaining Excel’s existing interface. Similarly, respondents said they want more version control and collaboration – without losing spreadsheet flexibility.

Naturally, a significant number of respondents said they’d like to see better error protection and prevention features.

Excel is evolving

As with most of Microsoft’s core software products, Excel is evolving amidst an influx of generative and agentic AI features.

Users can now generate formulas using Copilot, for example, automating tasks to avoid filling out large numbers of cells and fiddling around with formulas.

Yet this transformation of the platform has prompted some criticism in recent months, largely due to accuracy concerns. As ITPro reported in September this year, Microsoft itself urged caution when using new AI features.

Advice on the company’s support page warned users against relying on the software’s AI capabilities for financial reporting, legal documents, or other “high-stakes” scenarios.

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Microsoft has urged users of Office 2016 and Office 2019 to upgrade as both applications approach the end of their extended support deadlines next month.

Both applications will no longer receive updates as of 14 October, the tech giant confirmed last week. The move will also see a host of popular apps under the Office umbrella mothballed, including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint.

Similarly, Exchange Server 2016 and 2019 will be scrapped alongside Skype for Business.

This doesn’t mean these Office suites will completely stop working. However, Microsoft has been keen to emphasize that they’ll receive no more updates or technical support.

Opting to stick with these versions puts users at greater risk of security breaches, according to Jeremy Carlson, Microsoft's director of product marketing for the Microsoft 365 portfolio.

“Continuing to use software after end of support can leave your devices vulnerable to potential security threats, productivity losses, and compliance issues,” he wrote in a community notice.

“After that date [14 October], Microsoft will no longer provide security fixes, bug fixes, or technical support for these products.”

Microsoft urges users to upgrade

Naturally, Microsoft is urging users to sign up for Microsoft 365, its most up-to-date suite of applications. For those with fewer than 300 users, there is the option of Microsoft 365 Business Standard.

This, Carlson explained, represents a more cost-effective option based on their individual needs and budget.

“We know there is no “one-size-fits-all" approach for managing end of support – and we encourage you to explore our business and enterprise plans to find the right fit for your organization,” he wrote.

Notably, there is a lifeline for those that aren’t keen on switching to the cloud-based option, Carlson revealed. This comes in the form of the Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) 2024.

This option will give users access to the most recent supported on-prem versions of Office for commercial customers.

“The Office Long-Term Servicing Channel (LTSC) is designed for devices that cannot accept feature updates or connect to the internet,” Carlson explained. “Office LTSC 2024 was released last year along with new on-premises versions of Project and Visio.”

A big month for Microsoft shops

October is set to be a busy month for Microsoft customers worldwide. In addition to Office 2016 and 2019 being scrapped, the end of life deadline for Windows 10 also falls on 14 October, meaning users will either be forced to upgrade or continue without regular updates.

Once again, there is a lifeline for those opting to stick with the older operating system – but it’ll come at a steep price.

Extended support for Windows 10 will set enterprises back $61 per device, and that’s just for the first year. Thereafter, the price doubles on an annual basis for a maximum of three years.

As ITPro reported earlier this month, the total cost worldwide could reach a staggering sum. Analysis from Nexthink found maintaining custom versions of the operating system could top $7.3 billion globally.

A significant portion of users appear to be content with the situation, or at the very least are taking their time ahead of the deadline. Figures from Statcounter showed the operating system still holds a 43% market share.

Based on the current rate of upgrades, this means that around 121 million devices worldwide will still be running Windows 10 by the October deadline.

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Microsoft quietly rolled out new AI features for Excel that allow users to generate formulas using the tech giant’s Copilot AI tool, but warned against using them if you're concerned about accuracy.

As detailed in a post on the Microsoft 365 Insider blog, the new ‘COPILOT’ function for the spreadsheet software allows users to automate tasks and skip the drudge work of filling out a myriad of cells and tinkering with formulas.

“It can be painful and time-consuming to wrangle data, summarize feedback, categorize information, and brainstorm ideas,” the blog post reads. “The new COPILOT function in Excel for Windows and Excel for Mac is here to save time and supercharge your workflows.”

Using natural language prompts, users can simplify this experience, Microsoft said. Example formulas touted by the firm specifically highlighted text summarization, using ‘=COPILOT("Summarize this feedback", A2:A20)’

Others included AI-generated text for product descriptions, using ‘=COPILOT("Create a description for this product based on its specs", B2:B8)’

The feature also works alongside existing Excel functions, and can be used inside formulas such as LAMBDA, SWITCH, WRAPROWS, and IF.

“You can use results from other formulas as part of its prompt,” the blog post reads. “This makes it easy to add AI features to your spreadsheets without changing how they are set up.”

Excel AI features come with a big catch

There is one big caveat, however. In a separate support page, Microsoft warned users not to use the new AI function “for any task requiring accuracy or reproducibility”.

The support page also advised users not to use the Copilot function for “tasks with legal, regulatory, or compliance implications”.

“Avoid using AI-generated outputs for financial reporting, legal documents, or other high-stakes scenarios,” it reads.

Simply put, users will need to keep close tabs on the feature to ensure that it’s not producing false or misleading outputs.

“Its output should be reviewed and validated for accuracy, especially for critical business decisions or reports,” the original blog post states.

Microsoft also highlighted data privacy considerations when using the new feature, telling readers that data sent through the Copilot function is “never used to train or improve” its AI models.

“The information you input remains confidential and is used solely to generate your requested output,” the company said.

Taking the misery out of spreadsheets

Of course, this is a pilot scheme for selected Windows Insiders and is nowhere near full roll-out. Microsoft isn’t alone in touting AI as a game changer for spreadsheets, however.

In June, Perplexity also launched a tool aimed at automating spreadsheet drudge work. Dubbed Perplexity Labs, the tool allows users to craft spreadsheets and reports using natural language prompts.

The Labs tool can write and execute code to structure datasets, for example, or apply formulas and create charts based on simple user prompts.

Startups are also jumping on the bandwagon in this domain. This includes Sourcetable, a US-based startup developing what it claims is the world's first “self-driving spreadsheet”.

The autonomous spreadsheet tool also draws on natural language prompts - either through voice commands or keyboard - to carry out tasks on behalf of the user.

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Sourcetable, a startup developing what it’s dubbed the world’s first ‘self-driving spreadsheet’, has raised $4.3 million in funding to transform data analysis.

The seed funding round was led by Bee Partners, with participation from a host of leading industry figures including Hugging Face co-founder Julien Chaumond.

Sourcetable’s autonomous spreadsheet uses AI to streamline and simplify data analysis activities for users. Using natural language prompts, users can give the tool instructions - either through voice commands or keyboard - to edit or carry out multi-step activities.

The firm’s aim is to create a “vibing” experience when using spreadsheets, similar to the emerging “vibe coding” trend in software development, in which devs use AI tools to generate code rather than writing manually.

"AI is the biggest platform shift since the browser, with a bigger opportunity for disruption. Sourcetable is building the AI spreadsheet for the next billion users, be they human or AI," says Eoin McMillan, CEO & Co-founder of Sourcetable.

"As AI makes analysis easier, everybody will become an analyst. Sourcetable's AI automation ushers in a new era of productivity and human cognition."

How Sourcetable’s spreadsheet tech works

Sourcetable said its autopilot mode can complete a “wide range of complex tasks” that would typically require advanced spreadsheet expertise.

This includes creating and editing financial models, generating spreadsheet templates, building pivot tables, and cleaning and enriching data.

The in-built AI model can understand the context of data without requiring users to pre-select ranges, the firm said, or interpret multiple ranges across different tables.

While the tool will seek human clarification when instructions are unclear, it otherwise functions as an autonomous assistant for users working in spreadsheets.

Sourcetable revealed that users will be able to draw upon a wide range of models when using the tool, and the AI will autonomously select or combine the optimal models for specific tasks.

“This agility allows Sourcetable to integrate the latest breakthroughs from OpenAI, Anthropic, Groq, Meta (Llama), Nvidia, Prior Labs, DeepSeek, and Hugging Face on the day of release, ensuring users always have access to cutting-edge AI capabilities,” the company said in a statement.

Sourcetable wants to shake up data analysis

Sourcetable was founded by San Francisco-based entrepreneurs, Eoin McMillan and Andrew Grosser, both of whom have extensive experience in machine learning and AI from previous startup ventures.

This technical background has enabled the team to ‘leapfrog’ AI tools offered by leading platforms such as Excel and Sheets, the firm claims.

The platform was originally built for technical users such as data scientists, Python programmers, and SQL analysts.

“For decades, we’ve been stuck in a world with those who know Excel, and those who don’t. Not anymore. Today’s AI supercycle demands that all of our interfaces transform to become useful for both humans and machines, and they all demand a new data architecture,” said Michael Berolzheimer, managing partner at Bee Ventures.

“Eoin, Andrew and the Sourcetable team have done it. Now anyone, human or agent, can benefit from accurate, reliable data analysis, underpinned by the all important spreadsheet.”

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AI is yet to have the same transformative impact on business and knowledge work akin to the launch of Excel, according to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, but he appears confident a big breakthrough is looming on the horizon.

Speaking on Dwarkesh Patel’s podcast, Nadella harkened back to Microsoft Excel and its impact on financial forecasting in years gone by, which involved the exchange of faxes and hard copies - an often laborious process which, upon reflection, significantly impeded enterprise efficiency.

“Faxes went around, somebody then got those faxes and then did an inter-office memo that then went around and people entered numbers … ultimately, a forecast came, maybe just in time for the next quarter,” Nadella said.

“Then somebody said, ‘hey, I'm just going to take an Excel spreadsheet, put it an email, send it around, people will go edit it, and I'll have a forecast,’” Nadella added.

"So the entire forecasting business process changed because the work, the work artefact and the workflow changed.”

Ultimately, this is what needs to happen with AI being introduced into knowledge work, Nadella noted.

The Microsoft chief exec spoke about how his own work processes have changed as he’s begun to use AI, mentioning that he had even deployed Copilot in preparation for this podcast.

This shift towards AI becoming a major presence in staff workflows will take time though, he thinks, with management teams and individuals engaged in knowledge work having to gradually shift processes towards AI use.

Changing the metric on AI success

Nadella also focused on how the industry at large is measuring the success of AI, particularly regarding how it impacts the global economy and creates market value.

In particular, he hit out at the industry fixation on achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), which represents the point at which AI can match or surpass human cognitive capabilities.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, Microsoft’s leading partner on the technology, has been highly vocal about the company’s work toward achieving this goal in recent years.

“Us self claiming some AGI milestone - that's just nonsensical benchmark hacking to me,” Nadella said.

Notably, Nadella said the real benchmark for AI’s success is the world growing in economic terms.

The same principle could be applied to AI success within businesses. Firms need to keep their focus on what value AI products are driving within companies and within staff workflows.

Speaking to ITPro, Dom Couldwell, head of field engineering EMEA at DataStax, agreed with this outlook, noting that AI projects should be “judged on the value that they deliver to the business" - be that in terms of a return on investment (ROI) or the additional benefits afforded to individual workers using the tech.

“Without those specific metrics, it is hard to justify the spending and take a project from proof of concept into production, particularly at scale,” he said.

How can businesses get value out of AI?

The most successful AI projects are the ones that begin by focusing on the value side first and then work backward, Couldwell said, rather than those which haphazardly dive into the tech and try to establish a use case via experimentation.

Successful firms look for a ‘Minimal Viable Product (MVP)’ as opposed to over-engineering, he added. This means asking what the minimum level of complexity needed is.

“The added risk around Gen AI projects is that teams are adopting this new tech for the sake of it versus really needing it or having that solid business case in the first place. While there might be demand from the business to be seen to be doing something around AI, taking the time to investigate and test beforehand will pay off,” Couldwell said.

“In terms of how to approach this, my advice with the companies I have worked with would be to pressure test the approach - pick a project that is directly linked to how the business makes more revenue or saves significant costs in order to put together a project, but not an area that is too tied to other processes,” he added.

This process ensures that businesses can build with AI and demonstrate what’s effective before looking at larger projects that can benefit from the lessons learned along the way.

Is AI delivering for businesses?

There are mixed reports from companies as to how effectively AI is delivering value in businesses, though Microsoft itself claimed late last year that generative AI tools offer a return on investment (ROI) of $3.70 for every dollar invested.

The report also claimed that AI deployments take under eight months to roll out, with ROI delivered within 13 months.

Other research has been less positive, though, with research from Appen in October 2024 suggesting that ROI from AI has dropped significantly over the last three years due to data issues.

While 56.7% of AI projects delivered meaningful ROI in 2021, the report found, this figure dropped to 53.5% in 2022 and 51.9% the year after. By 2024, meaningful ROI delivery had sunk to 47.3%.

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Microsoft has dismissed claims circulating online that it uses customer data to train its AI models, making it the latest firm forced to publicly clarify its AI policy.

A blog post written by author Casey Lawrence initially voiced concerns, suggesting that Microsoft had implemented an ‘opt-out’ feature that, left unchecked, would allow the firm to use customer data in AI training.

“Microsoft Office, like many companies in recent months, has slyly turned on an ‘opt-out’ feature that scrapes your Word and Excel documents to train its internal AI systems,” Lawrence said.

Lawrence warned against anyone using Word documents to write proprietary content, saying that they should ensure the ‘opt-out’ feature is selected. The blog includes instructions on how to opt out of the AI training policy.

Users on social media voiced similar concerns, with one popular tech account, nixCraft, posting a screenshot of Lawrence’s blog to X with a quoted portion of the blog’s text.

Microsoft has since denied these circulating claims, responding on social media by posting a rebuttal of the AI training accusations to its Microsoft 365 X account.

“In the M365 apps, we do not use customer data to train LLMs. This setting only enables features requiring internet access like co-authoring a document,” Microsoft said.

Wary customers

This marks the latest in a series of spats between big tech firms and customers over alleged AI training policies, with both Slack and Adobe recently caught in the crosshairs over similar features.

In May, Slack was forced to update the language of its training policy to allay confusion among users, confirming that it uses some customer data to develop “non-generative AI/ML models.”

Slack said users could opt out if they didn’t want their data used in these models, though many rallied against the firm and the automatic opt-in nature of the policy.

The firm learned its lesson from the training fiasco, though. One company exec told ITPro it had been busy engaging with customers to clarify its AI training policies.

Adobe had a similar issue in June when users complained the firm was training its AI model Firefly on customer content. Like Slack, Adobe updated its policy and sought to assure customers that it would never assume ownership of an individual’s work.

The firm even faced backlash from its own staff, with screenshots from an internal comms channel showing employees complaining about the firm’s poor communication and badly handled response.

Microsoft has updated the web version of Excel with a raft of new features and a new user interface with added functionality, bringing it closer in line with its desktop counterpart.

The tech giant has added new features to the Mac and Windows versions of the spreadsheet app over recent weeks, including introducing checkboxes and support for the ODF 1.4 file format.

But now it’s focussing on bringing the web version of Excel up to speed with its desktop cousins, promising that the new user interface will streamline a number of common tasks.

In a blog post announcing the update, Microsoft claimed it has modernized the Excel grid with “a host of powerful features designed to make your spreadsheet tasks simpler, faster, and more enjoyable.”

The first of these updates is making it easier to resize rows and columns with fewer clicks. Now, users can simply hover over the border of a row or column header and then click and hold the handles to resize it.

Web users will also get simplified insert options, enabling them to add rows and columns by hovering over the respective header and clicking the small ‘plus’ circle that appears to insert a new column or row.

In a similar vein, users can also show hidden rows and columns with a single click by hovering over the respective header and hitting the small arrow symbols that will appear.

More Excel updates ease user experience

As part of the updates, Microsoft confirmed Excel for the web will now give users the ability to freeze panes for simplified navigation in larger spreadsheets. You can now pin important headers or columns to ensure they remain visible as you scroll.

A new drag and drop feature should help users rearrange elements of their spreadsheet more easily, allowing you to drag and drop any selected row or column into another.

The final addition included in this update is the ability to highlight important cells, rows, or columns within Excel, a quality of life feature that promises to dramatically improve the readability of larger spreadsheets on the web.

Microsoft has announced new integrations for Python within Excel, with the aim of streamlining data analysis and empowering a wider range of workers.

Once active, users will be able to access the popular programming language through a new ‘PY’ function that can be accessed within Excel, without any need for add-ons.

This can be used to manipulate data within a workbook, produce advanced visualizations, or train sophisticated machine learning (ML) models. Users will also be able to bring external data into their Excel workbook using Power Query.

Data teams may already have a workflow that involves manipulating data using Python, and then moving this into Excel for user-friendly and shareable visualizations. By combining the two, Microsoft could cut out unnecessary work to streamline the process.

The firm also announced that workbooks that utilize Python analytics can be freely shared among co-workers, and workers can access up-to-date analysis from a workbook even if they don’t have Python in Excel activated for their accounts.

It could be used in this way to widen access to data analysis results within a team, circumventing any bottlenecks a data science team may encounter at present when it comes to translating Python data into digestible workbooks for non-technical colleagues.

A key selling point of Python is its relative ease of use compared to other programming languages. It is also known as a powerful tool for manipulating large amounts of data and creating visualizations. Visual Basic for Applications (VBA), which is typically used to automate tasks within Microsoft apps, lacks the finesse of Python when it comes to data analysis.

Python also has many tens of thousands of libraries, which can be easily called to produce powerful functions, and this will partly carry over to Python in Excel.

Microsoft partnered with Anaconda, a popular provider of Python repositories used for data science, to run its data science and machine learning (ML) specific Anaconda Distribution in Azure.

It is through Anaconda that Python in Excel accesses some of the most commonly-used Python libraries including ‘pandas’ for data analysis, ‘seaborn’ and ‘Matplotlib’ for advanced data visualization, and statsmodels for statistical modeling.

Developers and data scientists who make use of more niche, open-source Python libraries that are not immediately available through Anaconda may struggle to perform their duties through the service.

As a tech person, there’s nothing quite as infuriating as seeing people dispensing opinions on technology that have quite clearly been pulled directly out of their posteriors. We saw it with US and UK governments’ Huawei bans, and it’s now rearing its head again with the news that England’s much-vaunted track and trace system neglected to count around 16,000 cases due to a technical error.

This technical error is currently believed to be the result of using an Excel spreadsheet to store case records, which hit the maximum number of columns and then stopped updating. These reports are unconfirmed at time of writing, but this hasn’t stopped political commentators from flocking to Twitter to take potshots at the government for ‘wasting billions’ on a track and trace system that uses ‘a consumer app’ to store records. Excel, so they say, isn’t a database system, and the government is wrong and stupid for using it as such.

While I’m no fan of the current government or it’s handling of the coronavirus crisis, this grinds my gears somewhat. As any IT person worth their salt will be able to tell you, Excel is actually a phenomenally powerful database tool when used in the right way. With the right formulas and macros, it can do just about anything, and it even includes support for highly advanced tools like SQL queries.

Many databases run quite happily as Excel spreadsheets, and suggesting that Excel is somehow incompatible with these use-cases is simply incorrect. What’s more, it does a great disservice to the extreme flexibility and extensibility of Microsoft’s industry-standard spreadsheet package. Excel is, in many ways, the swiss army knife of enterprise IT, able to turn its hand to a truly staggering array of applications.

However, some situations require more than a swiss army knife – and it’s here where the jibes have hit upon a grain of truth. If the track and trace programme has been using Excel as its main platform for storing records of cases (although remember that this is still yet to be confirmed) then the problem isn’t with using Excel as a database platform, it’s with using Excel as a platform for such a large and rapidly-changing database.

The fact is, flexible though it may be, Excel is only an effective tool for managing databases up to a certain size. Quite aside from the problem of column limitations, you start running into performance issues once the database grows too large. Not only that, but fully-fledged database management platforms like SQL Server offer far more fine-grained control and querying capabilities, as well as more integration and processing options.

The IT industry has spent years perfecting database technology in a dizzying array of permutations and combinations, including SQL, MySQL, PostgreSQL, NoSQL and many, many more. They’re the building blocks of enterprise software development, and there is a wealth of knowledge and support out there for those that wish to use it, not to mention legions of qualified database administrators to run them.

To my eyes, what this indicates is a system that has been hastily cobbled together, using the tools that were immediately available to hand; a bodge-job using components that were just about good enough to serve the intended function, rather than the ones that were best-suited to it. You can accuse the government of incompetently building a flawed system using poorly-chosen tools by all means, but laying the blame at the feet of Excel and dismissing it as a spreadsheet programme that shouldn’t run databases is similarly short-sighted and ignorant.

You will likely know how to do a few basic things in Microsoft Excel and get by on that, but what if you were able to unlock the potential productivity and efficiency gains the software can offer? Our list of some of the best Excel courses on the market today aims to help you do just that.

Today the internet is overflowing with high quality Excel courses that can help users develop basic skills, or move onto some of the more advanced tools. These are well worth considering, as improving your Excel skills will boost your value to employers, but with so many courses on offer, it can be hard knowing where to start.

Which Excel course is right for me?

Not everyone needs to master every Excel function. It’s important to understand what the Excel training levels are and what you’ll gain from each. With this understanding, you’ll find the right Excel training resource for you.

Most Excel training is divided into three levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. Here’s what to expect from each:

Beginner Excel Training

As you might have guessed, beginner Excel training is meant for those new to spreadsheets and is particularly useful for understanding the basic concepts.

In beginner training, you’ll learn things like how to build spreadsheets from scratch, enter data, format cells, adjust rows and columns, and sort data.

Intermediate Excel training

Intermediate Excel training is designed for those wanting to make use of the software's more technical features.

At this level you’ll likely learn to create advanced Excel projects and get Excel to auto-populate templates. You’ll also learn how to make the most of the software in a business environment, including more advanced formulas and time-saving shortcuts.

Advanced Excel training

Advanced Excel training is designed to explore some of the most complex tools found in the software, including how it works with other platforms. This level of training is really only needed for those heavily reliant on Excel as part of their role, and those willing to learn a bit of coding.

In an advanced Excel training course, you might learn how to fully automate your spreadsheets so you can do things much faster with greater accuracy. You’ll also dig into the coding to understand how and why Excel can do what you need.

Our list of the best Excel courses has been populated based on a combination of factors, including community reviews, the convenience of each course, and whether they cater for absolute beginners or a current professional looking to up-skill or retrain. Our goal is to provide a broad range of options to give you a good sense the market today.

The best Excel courses for business users

The below list of best Excel courses represents a snapshot of the industry, and not a comprehensive list. You will find both free Excel courses and those that charge a fee, with each targeting different user types.

Microsoft's Excel Video Training

Provider: Microsoft

Price: Free

Course link: Microsoft's Excel Video Training

As the creator of Excel, you know that Microsoft’s Excel training videos will definitely do the job.

A simple landing page shows you all the video topics available, from formatting and formulas through to linked data types and power queries. These are all short snippets ranging from 30 seconds to two minutes in length, with step-by-step written guides included.

Although Microsoft’s support has ended, you can still access training for Excel 2013 via this site, and there’s also a link to a useful selection of Excel templates if you want some of the hard work done for you.

You won’t walk away from these videos as an Excel expert by any means, but they’re a great resource if you’re not Excel-savvy and need to quickly work something out.

HubSpot – Business & Marketing Resources

Provider: HubSpot

Price: Free

Course link: HubSpot – Free Marketing and Business Resources

HubSpot’s Excel Resources page is a must visit for those working in marketing, as it offers a free Excel crash course focusing on this area.

Even so, the skills taught are useful to the majority of business users, with training on managing large data sets, especially when using multiple systems like Google Analytics or a CRM to manage your data. Learn to clean, analyse and filter your data, as well as how to present it in an engaging way.

The icing on the cake is the selection of templates free to download.

LinkedIn Learning

Provider: LinkedIn

Price: $39.99 (£32) per month

Course link: LinkedIn Excel courses

Within Linkedin Learning, you’ll find over 150 classes on Excel, including basic intro classes and tutorials on everything from Python in Excel (particularly helpful now Excel lets you use Python natively for streamlined data analysis) through to advanced formulas and functions.

The courses vary in length and depth, some aimed at specific industries such as engineering and accounting for example, and you can also find tutorials dedicated to older versions of Excel, including 2016 and 2019.

What’s nice is that for every course you finish, you get a certificate of completion you can display on your LinkedIn profile.

Excel Basics for Data Analysis

Provider: IBM (via Coursera)

Price: $49 (£38) per month

Course link: Excel Basics for Data Analysis

If you’re looking for something a bit more formal, then Coursera has a large selection of Excel courses on offer – although IBM’s Excel Basics for Data Analysis is a particular highlight.

You can opt to take this as a stand alone course, although it is also available as part of a wider IBM Data Analytics with Excel and R Professional Certificate, so completing this will give you progress towards a certificate.

The stand alone course is great for beginners who need to use Excel for data analysis. You will be taught the basics of Excel, such as navigation and data entry, before moving on to more specialised techniques, such as data cleaning and analysis, with a particular focus on the use of pivot tables and associated formula.

Excel Master Diploma

Provider: eLearnExcel

Price: $999 lifetime payment

Course link: Excel Master Diploma

If you’re after certification to prove you’ve mastered Excel, then eLearnExcel is a great option.

There are eight courses available, each providing a CPD certified, internationally recognized certification. If you complete them all you gain your Excel Master Diploma, which, the site says, will place you in the top one percent of Excel users.

The courses, endorsed by Microsoft, are made up of tutorials and practice files, with online assessments and a final project for the diploma.

Microsoft has warned of a "massive" phishing campaign that uses coronavirus-themed emails to deliver attachments containing malicious Excel 4.0 macros.

These malware-laced emails, which have the subject line “WHO COVID-19 SITUATION REPORT," claim to come from the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, according to Microsoft.

"The COVID-19 themed campaign started on May 12 and has so far used several hundreds of unique attachments,” the company's Security Intelligence team announced in a series of urgent tweets.

If opened, the email’s attached Excel files will show a security warning and graph purporting to display coronavirus cases in the US. But if they’re allowed to run, the malicious Excel macros will download and run NetSupport Manager, a popular remote access tool that Microsoft’s security team says “is known for being abused by attackers to gain remote access to and run commands on compromised machines.”

The phishing attack then connects to a server that sends commands to the hacked PC.

“For several months now, we’ve been seeing a steady increase in the use of malicious Excel 4.0 macros in malware campaigns,” Microsoft warned. “In April, these Excel 4.0 campaigns jumped on the bandwagon and started using COVID-19 themed lures.”

This is the second time in two months that Microsoft has sounded an alarm about cybercriminals taking advantage of the ongoing coronavirus crisis to trick users into downloading malware onto their devices.

In April, Microsoft’s Security Intelligence team publicly warned of “prolific” hackers using Trickbot malware. Posing as the “USA Volunteer Organization” and the “USA Humanitarian Group,” hackers sent out hundreds of emails purporting to offer free coronavirus medical advice. Instead, those emails aimed to install malware via attachments.

To avoid raising red flags, phishers aren’t putting malicious URLs in emails, Microsoft recently warned on Twitter. “Instead, they leverage legitimate web services or use attachments that contain the link to the phishing site,” the company said.

There are multiple ways to launch a phishing attack, but email has become the platform of choice. It’s incredibly cheap to send messages to thousands of recipients, and at such a scale the scam only needs to fool a handful of victims to be lucrative.

You can avoid falling victim to these attempts by following our 10 quick tips for identifying phishing emails.

It's been two years since Microsoft launched Excel for iPad, and while it may have seemed like a slightly foolhardy move at the time, Apple's tablets have proved themselves to be more than capable of handling complex spreadsheet manipulation. Despite lacking a full keyboard and mouse interface, Excel for iPad is very nearly the equal of its desktop counterpart.

Here are our top 11 tips to get the best our of Excel on your Apple tablet.

1. Work on more cells at once with the iPad Pro

Apple's mammoth 12.9in tablet has been touted for its use as an enterprise prodcutivity tool, and so it's no surprise that Microsoft has brought out a special version of its app to take advantage of the iPad Pro's larger screen.

In addition to a larger screen surface to work across, the addition of the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard means that users can have much more delicate control of their spreadsheets, without worrying about deleting something vital with one ham-fisted swipe.

However, users should be aware that after the first 30 days, you'll need an Office 365 supscription to do anything more than view spreadsheets with the iPad Pro.

2. Duplicate before doing anything complex

Excel for iPad can be too powerful for its own good. If you're working on a spreadsheet created on a PC/Mac that has tons of formulae, pivot tables or other complex formatting, it's possible to accidentally clear the contents of a critical cell or drag a table out of place as you're swiping around the document.

The undo button in the top left corner can come to your rescue if you notice your mistake, but it's easy to damage something without noticing, and because the app is set to autosave by default.

If you're planning to work on a complex spreadsheet on the iPad, it's best to click the Save menu button (the little page icon with the two arrows) and click Duplicate before you get going. Then if you make any mistakes, you've got the original to fall back on, without having to rely on the Restore function.

Autofill is one of the most useful features of Excel on the desktop. It spares you from laborious entry of text or formulae by second guessing what you want to appear in the column or row. So, for example, if you've got a spreadsheet analysing daily sales figures, you might have the days of the week running down a column. With Autofill you can type "Monday" and "Tuesday" in successive cells, and then drag down to Autofill the next five cells with the remaining days of the week.

In the desktop version of Excel, Autofill is activated by clicking on the bottom-right corner of a selected cell and dragging downward/sideways. On the iPad, you first need to select the cells in question, by clicking on the first cell and then dragging the little circular handles down to the last. Then a pop-up menu will appear, with Fill among the options. Click that and drag the arrows that appear on your selection either downwards or sideways to Autofill the contents.

4. Moving the contents of rows or columns

Sometimes you might find you want to move the contents of an entire row or column to a new location. Trying to manually select all the data in a long row or column might be awkward on an iPad, but there's a much easier way to do it.

Click on the column/row's number or letter and the entire column/row will be highlighted. A pop-up menu will appear: select Cut. Now tap on the column to the right of, or the row below, where you want to paste the data and press Insert Left or Insert Above. The data will be pasted into the space, with the other columns/rows automatically shifted so that you don't leave an empty space in the worksheet.

5. Easy Autofit

If you find the content of cells is not fully displayed because the column width or row depth isn't sufficient, there's a quick way to solve this: double tap on the column/row's number or letter and the contents will Autofit so that you can read them fully.

If the content of only one cell in a particular row or column is running out of its box, it might be neater to simply wrap the content of that cell, rather than make the whole column/row bigger. To do so, tap on the cell to select it, and then tap again after a short pause (i.e. don't double tap) to bring up the Edit menu, and then select Wrap.

6. Combining selected data

Let's say, in the table shown in the screenshot below, that you wanted to create a separate row beneath the main table showing only the building costs (i.e. Premises + Mortgage Interest Payments) for each quarter. There's a simple way of doing it without writing the formula by hand.

Select the cell you wish to use (in our case B9), go to the Formulas tab and select Autosum and choose the SUM formula. Excel will assume you want the total for the entire column, which is incorrect. Instead, just tap on the cell B4 (for Q1 Premises costs) then type a comma, and then select the cell B6 for Q1 mortgage payments, and click tick to apply. You can, of course, use the Autofill technique from Tip 2 to apply that same formula for building costs across every quarter.

7. Look, but don't touch

As with all the Office for iPad apps, there are features of the desktop version not ported across the iPad. Conditional formatting is one, as is Sparklines, mini graphs which fit within the width of a cell to give you a snapshot of trends within a particular row or column.

However, conditional formatting and Sparklines will be displayed on the iPad if you open a spreadsheet containing them, and they will even update accordingly if you change the contents of their cells.

Beware of copying and pasting spreadsheets containing conditional formatting or Sparklines on the iPad, however. Whilst the formulas are carried across if you cut and paste such spreadsheets on the PC, this isn't the case on the iPad. Sparklines will disappear, and while conditional formatting will show in the pasted location, it won't update if you change the contents of the cells.

8. Go online to work together

Although Word for iPad has a rather awkward means of letting two people edit the same document simultaneously, this isn't possible with Excel. If somebody else has the spreadsheet open when you attempt to edit it, you'll be restricted to read-only mode.

If you must collaborate on the same spreadsheet simultaneously, you'll need to fire up the iPad's web browser and use Office Online (http://office.microsoft.com). It has a similar feature set to the iPad app, although the interface is geared towards desktop rather than touchscreen use.

9. Beware of chart limitations

If you're planning to add charts to your spreadsheets, it may be a job better left to the PC. Although on the face of it, the Chart options in Excel for iPad are quite sophisticated there are many different chart types, layouts and colours on offer there's little flexibility once the chart is on the page.

You can't choose to put the chart in a separate tab, for instance. You cannot omit data from the chart once it's been drawn, if you subsequently decide you don't want to include a particular column. Nor can you edit the axis, add a trendline, or add or remove data labels. More chart features may arrive in subsequent updates, but for now they're a little underpowered.

10. Freeze Panes

With the limited screen space afforded by an iPad, you might want to "freeze" information on the screen so that it always remains within view. In our sample spreadsheet in the screengrab below, for example, you might want to freeze the dates in the top row so that when you scroll down to different categories of cost, you'll always see the relevant date at the top of the screen.

To freeze a top row or column, click the View tab, then Freeze Panes and select the relevant option. If you wanted to select multiple rows or columns, tap the row number beneath the row you want to keep on screen, or the column letter to the right of the columns you want to keep frozen, and select Freeze Panes from the menu.

11. Find recently used functions

Most people tend to use a small fraction of the functions available in Excel. Instead of ploughing through the Formulas tab every time you want to enter a formula, you can click on the fx button next to the Formula Bar and open a list of recently used functions. The full list of functions is available underneath, each with an explanation of what it does, which you can open by clicking on the little green i' bubble next to the function's name.

The love-hate relationship between Apple and Microsoft is clearly back in love' mode at the moment. Following last month's launch of the iOS version of Outlook, Microsoft has now released a public preview of the next version of Office for Mac. It's been five years since Office 2011 was released for the Mac, back in 2010, so this new version is certainly long overdue.

However, Office 2011 received mixed reviews from some Mac users, who saw the introduction of the Ribbon' toolbar as an unwelcome intruder from the Windows world. The Ribbon isn't going away, but the streamlined makeover that it receives in this new version of Office for Mac should ensure that it gets a much better reception from Mac users.

Ribbon Redux

The adoption of the Ribbon in Office 2011 marked a conscious decision by Microsoft to bring the Mac version of Office more in line with its Windows counterpart. However, the sheer number of tools crammed into the Ribbon meant that the Mac versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint became much more cluttered and not to put too fine a point on it less Mac-like.

That criticism has clearly been taken to heart by Microsoft, as the single over-riding theme of the new Office for Mac is the move towards a more streamlined Ribbon. There are a few minor cosmetic changes that help here nudging one small set of buttons into a slightly different position eliminates a chunk of wasted space at the top of each document window, and removing the text headings that previously labelled different sections of the Ribbon helps to make the Ribbon look a little less cluttered. But, more importantly, there have also been some major changes to the way that the Ribbon itself is organised.

Word 2016

Word is the major beneficiary here, as a large number of tools and features have simply been removed from the Ribbon altogether. The Styles panel that previously occupied almost one quarter of the entire width of the Ribbon has now been reduced to a single button that activates a pull-down menu. Several tools for working with graphics files and clip-art have also been removed and relocated within the new Insert tab. This tab also incorporates additional tools for creating tables and charts, headers and footers, and even mathematical equations, resulting in a drastically streamlined Ribbon that takes up far less space on your screen.

Some of that space has been used to create a new Design tab that allows you to quickly format text within your documents, and a new Mailings tab to help with mail-merge work. Stepping away from the Ribbon, the document sidebar also gains a handy new Navigation view that lists headings and other important elements within a document so that you can quickly leap to the point you need.

Excel and PowerPoint

Excel and PowerPoint haven't received quite such drastic makeovers. These two apps are more likely to be used in full-screen mode, so Microsoft has left many of the standard Ribbon tools in place. However, the tabs that provide access to additional sets of tools have been completely reorganized. Like Word, PowerPoint and Excel both gain a new Insert tab, which gathers together all the graphics tools that were previously spread across three separate tabs for Tables, Charts and SmartArt.

They also gain a new View tab that provides a number of options for viewing your documents, such as the Notes view in PowerPoint or the split-pane view in Excel. The only minor oddity here is that the Play button for PowerPoint presentations has been removed from the main Home tab on the Ribbon, so when you want to preview your slides you'll need to either switch into the Slideshow tab or remember the fiddly three-finger keyboard shortcut that triggers the Play command.

Excel gains a number of new features for working with data, including PivotTable Slicers and an Analysis ToolPak for complex statistical work. However, PowerPoint mostly concentrates on refining existing features, such as the note-taking tools in its Presenter mode, and improved compatibility with the Windows version of PowerPoint.

OneDrive and the Cloud

Microsoft's Office blog says that the new Office for Mac is powered by the cloud' but, in fact, the 2011 editions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint already had a Share command in the main File menu that allowed you to save documents to OneDrive and SharePoint. The new Office for Mac merely relocates those options to the Save dialog within each app. A simple button allows you to switch between saving to online locations' or on my Mac', and you are then prompted to enter the details of your online account.

The Preview version of Office for Mac currently supports OneDrive and OneDrive for Business, and SharePoint. Apple's iCloud Drive is hard-wired into the Save dialog in Yosemite the latest version of the Mac OS so you can save documents to iCloud as well. The downside of this is that the preview version of Office for Mac currently only runs on Yosemite. Microsoft hasn't stated whether the finished version will also require Yosemite which will obviously cause problems for businesses that are still running older versions of the Mac OS nor has it said anything about supporting additional cloud services such as Dropbox.

Outlook 2016

Strictly speaking, the new' version of Outlook isn't actually new, as Microsoft actually released it for Office 365 subscribers last October. However, the new Outlook is included in this preview and will be part of the standalone edition of Office for Mac released later this year (along with the Mac version of OneNote).

The Ribbon has largely been left alone in Outlook, but there are interface changes elsewhere. Unread messages are now highlighted in blue, rather than bold text, and conversation threads show the entire body of emails rather than just a list of headers. These are small changes, but they do make it easier to quickly scan through the long lists of emails that pile up in our inboxes every day.

Is It Worth Upgrading?

Upgrades to Microsoft Office normally arrive trailing a long list of new features for each of its core applications, but the 2016 edition of Office for Mac focuses primarily on its more streamlined interface in order to improve productivity and ease of use. That's not a bad move, though, particularly given the criticisms that were made of the previous version of Office for the Mac. There are few entirely new features that make the new Office for Mac an essential upgrade, but its improved look and feel will be welcomed by Mac users who need to share Office documents with their Windows colleagues.

Verdict

There’s nothing that makes this a ‘must-have’ update, but the interface overhaul that has been given to the Ribbon makes the new Office for Mac feel less cumbersome and should speed up many routine tasks.

A picture tells a thousand words. It's an old adage but when it comes to interpreting data, it's an important one. It's a simplistic saying but the fact is, trying to get a handle on a mass of intricate detail is often better done visually than verbally.

It's a phenomenon that's well known. According to Lynell Burmack, author of the book Visual Literacy, information that is reinforced visually is more likely to be retained. "Unless our words, concepts, ideas are hooked onto an image, they will go in one ear, sail through the brain, and go out the other ear. Words are processed by our short-term memory where we can only retain about 7-bits of information (plus or minus two). Images, on the other hand, go directly into long-term memory where they are indelibly etched"

The trouble with handling numbers is that, unless you're a mathematical whizz-kid, it can be very hard to see recognisable patterns in a mass of digits. We often see this in business when the people whose job it is to access and analyse the data and produce the figures may not be the same people charged with interpreting it and acting upon it.

To show just how costly this gap could be, take the example of the mortgage company described in the book, Keeping up with the Quants. In this description of the power of numbers, analytics professor, Thomas Davenport sets out the true story of how an analyst from the unnamed mortgage company presented his bosses with figures showing the extent to which the firm was exposed to defaulters: his advice was not acted upon and the company ended up losing millions.

Whose fault was this? The head of mortgages was quick to point the finger, "If the analyst showed me a model, it wasn't in terms I could make sense of. I didn't even know his group was working on repayment probabilities."

The phrase "wasn't in terms I could make sense of" speaks volumes here. If the data had been presented as an image where the bad risks had been highlighted, or even more starkly, where the company itself was shown to be in financial trouble, it might have concentrated minds.

Having the data itself is nothing. What's needed is a way to make it come alive'; to have that impact on managers, where in Burmack's words, they become indelibly etched'. There needs to be a way to present the numbers, the raw data, in a graphical form.

To make a story out of those numbers is a particular skill and has led to the creation of a new job within some organisations the data visualisation specialist. This is someone whose role is to present information in a meaningful way: to ensure that vital trends aren't being missed.

Even if there's not a requirement for a single individual to work in this area, companies are painfully aware that there's a disconnect at the moment between the analysts who are often the ones pulling the raw data together and the business analysts who want to do something meaningful with it.

To bridge this gap, Microsoft has been working on ways to improve the visualisation functions of some of its offerings. In July 2013, the company brought out Power BI, a new BI suite designed to enhance the data visualisation features of Microsoft software.

The suite comprises a range of products, some of which previously existed and some of which are new, but all provide a way for organisations to present data in a more attractive manner.

The most notable of these is Power View, an interactive data exploration and visualisation tool, included with SQL Server and SharePoint. The product works by taking data from PowerPivot files or from SQL Server and allowing users to concoct interactive visual presentations. It offers a way for users to compare different charts if you're using different sets of figures. It also offers geographical presentation by using Bing maps and can be used to demonstrate key performance indicators.

The company has now gone one stage further and incorporated Power View as part of Microsoft Excel 2013 to enable Excel users to make the most of this feature.

This makes sense as Excel is probably the first port of call when it comes to business intelligence. Some of the visualisation features may be limited it has a default set of colours and lines for example - but it's still a powerful tool when it comes to providing data insights.

Power Query (formerly known as Data Explorer) allows users to integrate data from other sources into Excel for further manipulation and exploration. For example, it would be possible to combine sales figures with product supply information. Or combine your own company's figures with publicly available data for example, an insurance company could look at its own policy data with regional crime figures.

Power Map is a function previously known as GeoFlow that employs 3D imaging to plot data points on a big map file. Using the software, a user can visualise each data point as a column, stacked column or heat map point. In addition, users can interact with the software as they would within a normal maps environment in other words, by using latitude and longitude references or by using post/zip codes.

Again, this could be used in conjunction with public data to provide regional figures, offering a way to look at information across different geographic regions.

As an indication of how powerful this software is, Mark Dodd from Microsoft partner, Consolidata, demonstrates the way Power Map presents data. First of all, he describes how a user gathers a mass of data that needs to be plotted against geographic variables.

To do this, Power Map, makes use of another older Microsoft product, PowerPivot. This is software that allows very large volumes of related, multi-table data to be used for calculations. PowerPivot files can be handled by SharePoint, so they could be a resource used by many people as the files are held within a server. PowerPivot can also be used with an SSAS Tabular model, also hosted on a server.

Dodd points out that Power Map offers three ways of presenting data: column, bubble and heat map and gives examples of geographic descriptions of sales by postcode and by gender, explaining that a user has a choice of data aggregation.

Whatever the software, one of the key aspects of business intelligence is the drive towards cloud, partly explained by this requirement to share information. The cloud is fast emerging as a viable option for enterprises and Microsoft has launched Microsoft Office 365 to bring cloud services to a new generation of users.

Power BI for Office 365 provides extensions to the Office 365 suite that allows customers to deliver models and visualisations into the Office 365 cloud environment and synchronise these with on-premise data sets.

By using Power BI for Office 365, users will have the chance to play with, organise and manage that data, wherever they are: whether that be in the office, at home or in a coffee shop. Using a cloud-based spreadsheet will help to crack one of the biggest problems faced by analysts working on figures how can employees ensure that they're working on the master worksheet: it's easy to lose track when so many changes have been made and different copies of the same file are being mailed between participants in a discussion. A central copy makes things much clearer.

Microsoft has taken further steps, though. Earlier this year, it made some additions to its OfficeStore, which enabled users of Excel and Office to improve the way they handled the presentation of data, perfecting the visualisation process.

Recently, Microsoft has been exploring some other areas and new visualisation types. There have been four new releases, all emerging from the Microsoft Visualisation for Business and Entertainment (VIBE) initiative.

Histogram, which last month became VIBE's first visualisation release, shows the distribution of data via a bar graph of data-point frequency. Such visualisations are commonly used by scientists, and this add-in makes it far easier to create them in Excel.

A related app, Histogram 2D, examines the distribution of two values with a visualisation also known as a density plot. Another app, Treemap, as its name suggests, allows Excel users to create treemaps based on their own data (Treemapping is a way of presenting information as a set of nested data). The last tool being offered is Steamgraph, an application that allows users to examine data volume over time.

These are more specialist tools, though: going beyond the limits of what most business executives would be looking for.

The main thrust of the changes that are being proposed by Microsoft is to aid the drive towards easier visualisation. There's an ever-growing amount of data out there - according to IDC, the total amount of data in the world will increase from 2,596 exabytes in 2012 to a whopping 7,235EB by 2017 and companies will look to do more with that information. Digging into this data is going to be a high priority for many organisations.

The company that wants to make real headway in visualisation of data does need to get a firm idea of what information needs to be conveyed. It can't be a question of finding data and using the Microsoft product of choice to deliver a more visual representation.

The mistake is in thinking that visualisation is only about the technical knowledge of a piece of software, it goes much deeper than that. According to data visualisation expert, Nathan Yau, author of the most definitive books on the topic, anyone wanting to go down the visualisation route needs to have a clear thought in his or her head. Introducing his new book, Data Points, he writes "We often think of visualisation as a design and programming task, but the process starts further back with the data ... you have to understand the data its trends and patterns, along with its flaws and imperfections and the rest follows."

So, to get started, a company needs to have a clear idea what it wants to measure; how it's going to obtain those figures, what software it's primarily going to use and how best to illustrate those figures: a line chart, pie chart, data flow diagram or whatever. And of course, it also needs to decide what software is best for its needs will Excel be enough? Will you need the additional capabilities of SQL Server? Is there a need for cloud software.

But choosing the right software is only half the story: The real challenge is making those figures count and it's not going to be through obtuse numbers, it will be through graphs, maps, illustrations, infographics and pie charts. The well-informed company of today will be the smart company of the future.

Effective data analysis is now at the core of most successful businesses. Whether produced externally or internally, those companies that can draw value from the rafts of information available to them are often the ones that end up ahead of the competition.

Where systems and data are disparate and siloed, it's difficult to measure key performance indicators (KPIs), especially where multiple applications are used by different departments. Just taking the data from those applications to feed separate reports can be onerous, not to mention the problems associated with cloned data.

Centralisation and automation, with powerful analysis tools layered on top, can provide the solution to these KPI woes, producing polished dashboards and rich reports that can be shared easily across an organisation.

Slicker visualisations with Excel

Often, the solution is right under a business' nose. Microsoft Excel, which remains at the heart of many organisations' business intelligence strategies, is a solid platform on which to base slicker visualisations and dashboards that present KPIs in easy-to-understand formats.

It is possible to either import some pre-defined templates for Excel, or you can easily create your own; inputting data and building the right formulas, and then creating dashboards around that with tools such as Pivot tables. When all this is plugged into SharePoint, an Excel-based dashboard opens up, enabling anyone to be kept up to date.

Importing and analysing data from other services is now easier too, with services like PowerPivot and Power View able to make sense of various kinds of information streams. Like any tool, Excel has its limitations, but the application continues to improve and expand.

"There are solutions on the market that aim to address these limitations not least by Microsoft, whose PowerPivot feature in conjunction with SQL Server and SharePoint uses an Excel front-end in-memory analysis component that allows users to analyse larger volumes of data on-the-fly," said Helena Schwenk, head of the analytics research programme at MWD advisors.

Top employment law firm Lewis Silkin opted to clean up its fragmented reporting strategy using Microsoft SQL Server 2012. Its Finance Systems team took four days every month to collate data from various applications to feed 20 different reports. Not only this, but the data was neither accurate nor consistent

To address the problem, Lewis Silkin consolidated data into a central repository, drawing information from SharePoint Server and Microsoft Office. SQL Server 2012 Analysis Services, as well as the software integration and reporting tools, let the firm run a single business intelligence solution with one true view of operations.

Monthly and quarterly reports on trends, projects and client billing were automated. Thanks to the centralised system, client reports could also be created in a matter of hours, rather than days. Meanwhile, colour-coded "fuel gauges" show whether staff are hitting or missing targets. All of this makes for a slicker, better performing law firm.

Richer reporting with CRM dashboards

For smaller organisations Excel can prove invaluable, letting them keep track of operations without having to worry about excessive costs. For larger businesses, Excel has a range of business intelligence tools like PowerPivot, that allow for quick data crunching on big data sets, while giving departments a simple KPI management setup that they can tinker with themselves.

Sales, marketing and customer service teams need software that immediately presents them with KPIs in an easy-to-understand format. For this, IT wants to provide an app that can handle a lot of data, while providing an attractive, intuitive GUI that allows workers operate it easily, without the need for any technical know-how. Customer relationship management (CRM) systems are now becoming the norm across many industries, providing easy-to-use front-end dashboards that let sales teams drill into data by simply clicking around, with automation doing much of the work.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM can draw in data from multiple parts of a business, from Sales to Marketing and Services, delivering reports in real-time. Microsoft Dynamics CRM delivers customer information in a unified store via the Microsoft cloud. It contains all the data visualisations that sales teams need to make quick decision in one place, eliminating the need for other customer-related apps. And IT only needs to do one configuration. It's simple, intuitive and easy to manage.

Major Austrian bank Volkskreditbank (VKB) AG has seen the benefits of deploying Dynamics CRM. It was able to deliver KPIs to product teams, marketers and executives for reporting and analysis, tracking the performance of specific products, and allowing them to drill down by branch, region, time period or customer demographics. It was granular yet simple KPI oversight.

PowerPivot for Excel and Microsoft Dynamics work seamlessly together, meaning VKB could move data between the two programs, opening up the business intelligence options.

For VKB Sales teams, this reduced the time spent on drawing up KPI dashboards and scorecards, meaning they could expend more effort selling and building relationships with customers. In just one year, the average number of customers that each salesperson served shot up 32 per cent. It also reported time savings on report generation of 95 per cent and an 18 per cent improvement in customer service standard, meaning quality was not being sacrificed for quantity.

Performance management and operational effectiveness

You have your teams using Excel for operational performance monitoring, and you have your sales teams running shiny CRM solutions to check they are hitting those ever-important targets. But there are other avenues, if those tools are not quite right.

"One possible alternative to enterprise KPI monitoring/dashboard solution is a performance management application designed to provide business managers with means of measuring performance against organisational goals in order to ensure continuous improvement and operational effectiveness," Schwenk added.

"They typically work by continuously monitoring and measuring strategic goals (or plans) formulated in the boardroom against their execution at the operational level, with key performance indicators distilled into BI-driven metrics being the technological key."

Ideally, such a solution would be based on HTML so it can be easily shared and accessed across devices.

Fresenius Medical Care, which serves those suffering from chronic kidney failure, moved from using an SAP Business Information Warehouse feeding Microsoft Excel spreadsheets for its reporting to using PerformancePoint Services 2013, a component of SharePoint 2013 that comes with a Dashboard Designer.

The organisation based this on SQL Server 2012 Reporting Services (SSRS), while running SQL Server 2008 R2 Integration Services (SSIS) for extracting and transforming data, and SQL Server 2008 R2 Analysis Services (SSAS) for predictive analysis and data exploration.

With all this it was able to provide dynamic data visualisations to executives. As PerformancePoint is built on high-level languages - HTML5 and JavaScript - dashboards appeared the same no matter what machine or browser the user employed. That cross-compatibility is vital for department heads who don't want IT getting in the way of business.

With automated data conversion, company reports contained relevant, up-to-date information, and SharePoint made it simple for Fresenius employees to share, collaborate and draw up reports. This has all helped in making important business decisions, which, ultimately, can change lives for those suffering from kidney problems

Building a more intelligent business

Whatever a business does, whether that's making life better for those with serious illness, managing people's funds, or helping organisations with employee rights, workers need reports that display relevant, consistent KPI data so they can save time and make truly informed choices.

Fresenius, Lewis Silkin and VKB all chose Microsoft technology to provide the backbone for their KPI management and all saw major benefits, from cross-compatible software and interactive, up-to-date data visualisations, to better employee performance monitoring.

Those same tools are available for any organisation that wants to greatly improve their own in-house business intelligence operations.

Microsoft has made available a preview of its GeoFlow add-on for Excel 2013, which allows users to create interactive, 3D geospatial and temporal data visualisations.

GeoFlow enables information professionals to map over one million rows of data from an Excel workbook, including Excel Data Model and PowerPivot, onto Bing maps in 3D.

Four visualisation types available columns, heat maps, and bubbles.

The add-on also allows organisations to compare changes in data relative to geography over time and create cinematic guided tours of the data.

These functions, Microsoft claims, will enable information analysts to discover new insights into their data and engage audiences with the information more readily.

The tool, which was first demoed at the Redmond giant's Sharepoint Conference 2012 in November, is built on research emanating from Microsoft Research's WorldWide Telescope project, which, the company says, visualises terabytes of imagery and data from the astronomy community.

Curtis Wong, principal researcher at Microsoft Research Redmond, who has worked on both the WorldWide Telescope and GeoFlow projects said: "With the dramatic growth in geospatial and temporal data, we wanted to explore new toolsthat could help us understand the large-scale temporal and geospatial trends that affect businesses."

"The goal has always been to bring dynamic, interactive data visualisation to the business world. If we can visualise the universe [with the WorldWide Telescope], we can visualise almost anything else," Wong added.

The public preview of the GeoFlow software is available for download immediately. A date for the full release has not yet been announced.

Office 365 isn't a new version of the Office desktop suite; it's a cloud service offering the key server-based versions of desktop applications Exchange mail server with Forefront malware and spam protection, SharePoint document management (which can also power a public-facing Web site) and Lync Online for communications (presence, instant messaging and audio and video calls).

This is similar to the BPOS cloud service Microsoft has been running, but it has newer versions of the server-side software that are multi-tenant and (Microsoft claims) better suited to running as a cloud service. You also get online versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook and some subscriptions even include the full Office Professional Plus suite. There's also an Office 365 marketplace for third-party tools that work with the service.

Office 365 is commonly seen as competing with Google Apps so we decided to look at them both.

Google Apps for Business includes Gmail with Postini spam and malware filtering and basic smartphone management, Calendar and Contacts, Google Docs (including spreadsheets and presentations), Chat, Groups mailing lists, Sites (for both intranet and public Web sites).

There's a control panel for managing users and what they can do with the Google Apps tools. You can also control user access to various other Google services like Picasa (which may get more important as Google combines personal and Google Apps accounts into a single account type) and add third party services from the Google Apps Marketplace.

Office 365 is commonly seen as competing with Google Apps so we decided to look at them both to see how similar the services really are and how they compare to each other.

Administration interface

As cloud services, you manage Google Apps and Office 365 online. Despite the simple layout, the Google Apps control panel is confusing until you learn where everything is. Options are scattered between Domain Settings, Settings, Advanced tools and the various links from the Dashboard tab which duplicate the Settings hierarchy. The Dashboard is also cluttered with adverts for optional tools in the Google App marketplace and adverts for new features.

The Google Apps admin page is cluttered with adverts for new features and third-party tools.

The Office 365 admin console is cleaner and better laid out, with a pane for switching between managing users, services and domain, clear explanations of what the main management tools are for next to the links to manage them. There are also handy shortcuts at the bottom of the window and links to relevant resources and community discussions.

By comparison, the Office 365 dashboard is clear and well laid out; you can see immediately what to do.

Google Apps has two levels of administration rights; the 'super admin' who has full access and admins to whom you can delegate some administration tasks. You can give different users a different mix of rights but you have to remember who can do what.

Office 365 has five named admin roles; you can give someone the rights to manage billing, passwords, users or services if you don't want them to have full admin rights. If you need more granularity, you can also set up administrator roles for Discovery Management, Records Management, UM (Unified Messaging) Management and other tasks in the Exchange Control Panel. It's more complex than Google Apps, but enterprises will welcome having the option.

Winner: Office 365. Microsoft's administration interface is not only better organised, it's also easier to handle when delegating management rights to others.

Setup and user management

There's a setup guide to get you started on Google Apps which walks you through things like verifying the domain you're using , creating user accounts and changing your MX records to point to Gmail (you need your own domain to use Google Apps). It's mostly clear and simple, but the duplicated instructions and sometimes circuitous inteface make setup a very fragmented experience. Setting up the Postini spam service tells you it may take up to an hour and again you have to change the MX records to redirect mail to the Postini service and configure some settings in Google Apps email by hand - all of which should be far more automated and suggests that Google has still not fully integrated the Postini acquisition with its platform.

Office 365's Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, SharePoint and Lync Online are running by default so all you have to do is create or migrate users. You only need to configure settings if you want to use an optional vanity domain, to get finer control or if you're integrating with on-premise servers. Thankfully the guides to doing this are clear and detailed.

You can create Office 365 users individually assigning admin rights and turning on services for them at the same time - or by importing a CSV file. You can also connect to an existing on-premise Exchange server and migrate users and mailboxes, or synchronise with your Active Directory to manage Office 365 users with roles and policies the same way you manage existing users (so you can delete a user in AD and they're removed from Exchange Online). You even get PowerShell cmdlets that let you configure Office 365 from the command line.

The Forefront rules and filters are very powerful but the interface is more complex.

To create Google Apps users you can set them up one by one in the control panel or import a CSV file - but most enterprises will use the Google Apps Directory Sync to get user details from AD or Lotus Domino, which the setup guide doesn't cover. This is a one-way sync and you have to leave the tool running on your local server and make changes to users in AD and propagate them up to Google Apps. To migrate mailboxes you have to run an Outlook sync utility individually and you can't migrate distribution lists, so you have to recreate them. It's initially confusing which tools you need for synchronising and migrating different information and settings to Google Apps, especially as the help pages often refer to old tools that have been replaced.

What Google Apps calls 'groups' are merely mailing lists. To control who gets which Google services you need to set up organization units. These cover both the core offerings like Gmail and the wide range of other Google tools whose terms and conditions your business will be deemed to have accepted if users from your business sign in with their Google Apps account - so this is mainly useful for disabling access to Picasa or YouTube if you don't want to accept those terms.

If business users sign into other Google services with their Google Apps account, the business is bound by the terms and conditions, so you can block this.

There's a separate option for whether users get access to functions and features from Google Labs, which could be a new option in Gmail or a tool like Google Moderator for managing a question and answer session at a company meeting (it's unclear what happens to these tools as Google recently announced that it is shutting down Google Labs). You can also use organization units to restrict which domains users can send email to, but you can't use them to control any other settings so it's nothing like as powerful as AD groups. You can't delete an organization without moving or deleting the users first, and deleting a user gives you the choice of deleting their documents or moving them to another user.

Both Microsoft and Google promise single sign-on. If you have Active Directory and AFDS 2, Office 365 users can use their Windows login to sign on to the local network (including any business apps you've integrated with that login) and to Office 365 services. Your Google Apps sign in gives you access to all the online Google services (including services that aren't part of Google Apps if the administrator allows this). It's possible to use a SAML bridge and the provisioning API to make that work with your in-house LDAP directory and local apps, but this is far from trivial to set up and it won't work with Google desktop applications.

Winner: Office 365. Microsoft's product is easier to set up and integrate into your company's existing infrastructure.

Mail server, malware and spam

Office 365 has a simple interface for basic admin options like managing passwords and security groups but you can also use the full Exchange Online interface. This is identical to the Web interface for Exchange Server, so it will be very familiar to Exchange admins. You get a comprehensive set of tools for setting up features like role-based access control, transport rules (such as adding disclaimers to external email) and reports to help you track down any problems along with auditing logs for compliance. If you don't need them then you can stick to the basics and be set up in minutes.

All the key email management features in Office 365 are available through a straightforward interface if you don't want to use the full Exchange interface.

Gmail has vastly fewer options because you don't get to control a mail server, although you do have some control over routing and mail gateway settings. The options are mostly on the level of setting up a vanity URL for users, choosing whether users can use Gmail Labs and chat or allowing Docs results to show up in a Gmail search. With Google looking after the mail server, most businesses won't need more admin options.

There are useful features in Google Apps that aren't turned on by default, and the interface is basic but clear.

Both Google Apps and Office 365 have a mailbox limit of 25GB. There's isn't an archiving option from Gmail, but with Office 365 you have a choice between third-party archiving services or a specific Office 365 plan with unlimited storage for email archiving.

Google Apps for business includes Postini Services for spam and malware detection, but you can't use it is you have multiple domains or if you want to use the Postini Discovery ediscovery and archiving service (in those cases you need to pay for Postini spam services separately). The Postini admin console is separate from the main Google Apps console and has tabs for viewing and deleting or approving messages detected as junk or viruses in the past three days, a week or for as long as it keeps records. The only option for virus blocking is whether you get email notifications that a mail has been quarantined, so you can check and release it if it's a false positive.

For spam you can whitelist individual senders, domains or mailing lists and block specific addresses or domains, set up inbound and outbound content filters for specific words, phrases or patterns and create attachment filters by size or type. You can also choose five levels of spam blocking, from lenient to very aggressive, and use category filters to put more emphasis on blocking explicit, 'racially insensitive' and financial spam. Oddly, IP whitelists to avoid spam filters go under the email settings pane, not in the Postini configuration page.

The Forefront admin console is also separate and has a very different interface from the rest of Office 365; it's powerful but also confusingly complicated for anything except checking quarantined email - we'd like to see this simplified for admins who don't already have Forefront expertise. What you get are the powerful Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) tools; not just malware and spam filtering, but options to safelist specific IP addresses, options for auditing and tracing messages and extensive filtering rules for both inbound and outbound email. You can therefore write rules to stop your users emailing out confidential information such as credit card numbers. You can upload dictionary files when you have a lot of values to use in a filter and manage rules by type; there are a lot more options compared to Postini.

Neither service lets you add additional reputation services or real-time block lists, but both let you use SPF for your own reputation - only Google Apps supports DKIM so far.

Winner:Tie. There's no outright winner in this category. Gmail is perfect if you want to get up and running as quickly as possible, while Office 365 provides fine grained controls and capabilities that will suit particularly fastidious organisations.

Mobile management

With Google Apps for Business, you can manage Android devices (as long as they run Android 2.2 or later). You can set a policy that enforces a password of a particular strength and wipe lost devices and users can remotely locate or lock their phone or make it ring. You have to manage rolling out device security as it requires an app users download from Android Marketplace, but turning on device security stops them using Android Marketplace until the app is installed (there's a direct link to get around the chicken and egg problem here).

There's also a connector to allow you to manage BlackBerry users of Google Apps from a BlackBerry Enterprise Server, and options for applying password and other device policies to smartphones using Google Sync or Exchange ActiveSync, which can end up as a confusing mix of management options.

Fine control of smartphone security in an interface that will be familiar to any Exchange administrator.

Office 365 has a more unified and comprehensive approach. Exchange Online gives you the same mobile device management as Exchange Server using ActiveSync Policies which work to some extent on virtually all smartphones including Android, iPhone. BlackBerry and Symbian as well as Windows Mobile and Windows Phone. You can enforce strong passwords and encryption, control individual device features (like Bluetooth), configure sync options like whether attachments can be downloaded on a phone and wipe devices automatically if the password is wrong too many times. You can also block or quarantine specific mobile devices from connecting. Users can even block or wipe their own phones.

Winner: Office 365's unified and comprehensive approach to smartphone management makes it the clear winner here.

Document management

Google Docs has no equivalent to SharePoint Online. Sites is a nice simple tool for creating internal or external Web pages and with Google Docs, you can control whether users can publish or share documents outside the business and whether documents default to being private or public. Otherwise sharing is an ad hoc thing that users control.

SharePoint Online combines workflow, document management and Web publishing and it looks professional straight away.

SharePoint Online combines Web page authoring for external sites with a full document management tool with libraries, lists, templates, discussion tools, shared calendars, RSS feeds, workflow, check in and check out options and version control plus powerful search options. Your Team Site includes pages for every user where they can blog, share links and documents or access their files on the move. Taking advantage of all the options is more complex but it's also far more powerful.

Winner: Office 365 has much more capable sharing features, but these are correspondingly more complicated to manage. If you need them though, then it's worth bearing with.

Chat and talk

Google Chat is the same simple but powerful tool available to the public; users can see presence for Google Apps contacts inside Gmail and start a text, voice or video chat from there once they've downloaded the plug-in. Alternatively they can use the Windows Google Talk software for text and voice chat or file transfer. Management is minimal; you can block chat outside the organisation or just warn users but you can't block file transfers.

Microsoft's Lync Online is more powerful. The extensive management options let you choose whether users can transfer files, make audio or video calls and talk to people outside the business or just colleagues.

Users can see each other's presence and status in Outlook and Outlook Web Access (including information from someone's Exchange calendar), and in any Office app where you're collaborating. It's possible to start a chat, voice or video call from there or from the Lync client. Microsoft is also promising Lync clients from a range of smartphones, offering IM first and voice features later. If you have an in-house PBX you can also set up unified messaging (like dialling phone calls from Outlook) and integrate voicemail with Exchange Online although we weren't able to test this.

Lync Online automatically federates with Windows Messenger and AOL for instant messaging.

Lync Online automatically federates with Windows Messenger and AOL for instant messaging. It can also federate with on-premise Lync servers if permitted by the server admin.

Google Apps can federate with any XMPP service, but to make that work you have to edit the SRV record in your domain by hand (or ask your domain hoster to do it for you), and you then get federation with all the services Google is connected to - you don't get to choose which are allowed or blocked. Similarly, you can allow users to chat with any Gmail or Google Apps user or block them all; you can't pick and choose which Google Apps-using companies they can communicate with and you can't block or allow chat access for specific users (individually or by groups).

Lync Online also incorporates the features of LiveMeeting; you can switch from an IM chat to an online meeting with up to 250 people with audio, video and Web conferencing, and you can schedule meetings in advance through Outlook. If you want to let people phone in to a meeting without needing Lync (customers for example), you can buy an audio conferencing service for Lync Online from BT.

Winner: Office 365. Google App's chat and messaging features are fine for most users, but for more fine-grained controls, Office 365 is better.

Online apps

Online apps like Google Docs are primitive compared to the richness of the full Office suite. In general, the features of the Office Web Apps and Google Docs are broadly similar, but while many like the sparse interface of Google Docs for its simplicity, the Office Web Apps tend to have the edge in sophistication.

Create a PowerPoint presentation in the Office Web Apps and you get good-looking themes and images you place are automatically sized to fit; a Google Docs presentation starts out in plain black and white and the designs aren't as appealing.

The Office 365 Outlook Web App has good self-service features for users (and you only see the admin links if you're an administrator).

Office Web Apps make inserting images from your hard drive the same simple experience it is in a local app. Google Docs gives you a wider choice for inserting images from a URL or a Google image search in a document, but it's a completely different dialog box in a presentation where inserting an image has fewer options and is a clunkier experience. The mismatch of features between different document types in Google Docs is more extreme and more jarring than in the Office Web Apps.

Sharing is better integrated in Google Docs, with a big blue Share button on the page that opens a popup dialog box. The Office Web Apps make you save the document and take you away from the editor to choose who to share it with, and take you back to viewing but not editing the document. This is because Microsoft assumes that you won't share a document until you've finished working on it. Updates appear live in Google Docs; this also happens in the OneNote Web App but the other Microsoft Web apps make you save your own changes to see edits by other users.

There are many features in both Outlook and Outlook Web that are missing from Gmail from macros to Quick Steps. Gmail equivalents tend to have fewer features which some users prefer because they're simpler. Gmail's stars, labels and priority buttons let you do much the same things as Outlook's flags, categories and folders with the advantage that a message can have multiple labels instead of being in only one folder.

You can turn an email into a Gmail task and then make a reminder, although this isn't quite as immediate as setting a follow-up flag for a specific day directly on an email. Filters the Gmail equivalent of Outlook rules have far fewer actions; in Outlook you can play sounds, send an automatic reply or even print a message that matches a rule. Gmail does include all the mostly commonly used ones though such as filing, forwarding and deleting messages.

Google Apps for Business Gmail users finally get the option to request read receipts, but these have to be enabled by the administrator and Gmail doesn't respond to delivery or read receipt requests in emails sent from Exchange. Gmail only shows the request when you close the message (Outlook shows it when you open the message) and you have to decide for each message as Gmail doesn't have Outlook's don't ask me again' checkbox. Even more irritating; if you don't want to send the receipt the button you click is marked not now' and Gmail will ask you again every time you read the message.

Apart from creating resources using Google's complex naming structure, you have only a few controls for calendar sharing.

Google Calendar can include shared resources - like rooms and projectors that need booking - which you create by typing in the details one at a time. Oddly there isn't a drop-down picklist to ensure the resources are given consistent names or a wizard to help with the complex naming conventions Google suggests, so you could end up with six conference rooms and one meeting room if you're not careful. If you follow the convention suggested, all resources that start with the same three letters will be grouped into a hierarchy but you can't do this manually.

Exchange Online has templates for creating resources like rooms (as well as equipment that isn't in a fixed location); you can even say which users can reserve rooms without permission and how often.

The Google Calendar features for end users aren't quite as powerful or complex as in Outlook, but you get the important options like overlaid calendars and recurring appointments. The Quick add tool that lets you type in a sentence, including the day and date of what you need to do, which then sets an event on the right day at the right time is a phenomenal time saver.

Winner: Tie. The Microsoft Web Apps for crediting documents are more sophisticated than Google's equivalents, but Google Docs has better sharing and collaboration features. Exchange Online has a plethorea of configurable options, but many organisations won't need these and may prefer Google's less feature-packed but also less cluttered approach.

Office and working offline

Depending on which plan you sign up for Office 365 includes download rights for the professional version of Office 2010, which includes OneNote, Publisher and Access as well as the usual Word, Excel and PowerPoint. You can load and save documents from all of them into the SharePoint Online site included in Office 365 and use the online collaboration features to edit documents at the same time in the main apps.

Depending on which plan you sign up for Office 365 includes download rights for the professional version of Office 2010.

This is a bargain; you get the full power of Office and the back-end servers that enable all the features, from using Information Rights Management to control who can distribute a file to asking people to update a database by replying to email. One great feature for businesses; you can host PowerPoint presentations online and present to a group of people on the Web, letting them ask questions and make comments ideal for training or sales pitches.

Also available are the publicly accessible Office Web Apps; Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote all but PowerPoint let multiple users edit the same document at the same time. SharePoint synchronisation neatly takes care of making documents available offline as well as accessing them from anywhere online.

Although offline access to Gmail and Google Docs (without the deprecated Gears plugin) is still only available to Google employees, Google recognises that offline document access matters. You can run software to sync Outlook with Gmail, Calendar and Contacts, and to move Outlook Notes to Google Docs (though they're read-only, it doesn't sync notes filed in folders - and if you use Outlook on multiple PCs you have to run the tool on all of them because categories, follow-up flags and other settings don't sync fully otherwise).

There's a connector toolbar for Office that lets you sync documents to Google Docs; the latest release fixes many of the problems in the first version, but it's not as polished as the SharePoint integration and converting files into Google Docs for editing online doesn't preserve all document features (the same thing happens when you open an email attachment in Google Docs). You can't edit watermarks, smart art, charts or footers in Office Web Apps, but you can see them in the read-only viewer and they're preserved in the document so you get them back when you open it back in Office. Google Docs doesn't show those details and doesn't keep them if you edit the document. Even fonts and line spacing can change when you move Office documents in and out of Google Docs.

Winner: Office 365. Microsoft's offline support is far from polished, essentially being dependent on SharePoint and subscription access to the full Office suite, but this is also, unsurprisingly, far more capable than Google's cumbersome and crude offline tools.

Service levels and support

The Google Apps dashboard repeatedly told us that there might be a problem with an unspecified Google Apps service; whenever we clicked through to the dashboard all the services showed as having no issues, but seeing the warning virtually all the time was concerning. Office 365 has a similar service health dashboard; neither service had any major outages or failures while we were testing them, but Office 365 didn't keep warning us of non-existent problems.

Despite frequent warnings about a problem, Google Apps didn't record any disruptions to the service.

Both services promise 99.9% availability. Google Apps measures this on a monthly basis with a credit of three days of service if the SLA is not met in a month; Office 365 credits 25%, 50% or 100% of the service cost if the SLA falls below 99.9%, 99% and 95% respectively.

Google Apps has no planned downtime; Office365 does schedule maintenance when usage is likely to be low for example Lync might be unavailable for five minutes at 1am on a Saturday morning and dates and times are listed five days in advance in the support area.

Support is definitely better with Office 365. Support is requested using the admin console and your requests are managed there, but 24-7 phone support is also available with response times from 15 minutes to four hours depending on the severity.

Issues with Office 365 can be broken down by exactly which part of the service is affected.

Google Apps also has 24-7 phone support but only for critical problems that involve more than half your users and affect the Google Apps Web services. If the problem was with mobile emails you'd be stuck with email support, which doesn't cover weekends.

Winner: Office 365, but only just. It's tough to judge how reliable a cloud service is, but Microsoft's technical support has better availability which is reassuring.

Verdict

Google Apps has a flat price of 33 per user per year; Office 365 has a range of prices from 6.50 to 17.75 a month, depending on whether you want Office, Office Web Apps, SharePoint, Lync or archiving it can be more expensive but you can choose what services you want to pay for and there are discounts for volume pricing (including transferring existing Exchange and SharePoint server licences to Office 365).

Google Apps is in a constant state of flux.

Google Apps is in a constant state of flux; the whole service is migrating to a new platform, there are two versions of the control panel available, there are options to give users access to previews of new interfaces and features from Google Labs which itself is going away, with no indication of what happens to the features it provides and new features like return receipts arrive periodically. Getting continuous, instant improvements is one of the benefits of cloud services, but if you're managing the service and supporting users you might prefer Microsoft's approach where updates come at regular intervals and you can choose whether to adopt them immediately or by a specific date.

That underlines one key difference between the two services that has little to do with features; Office 365 has the professional feel of a service planned in advance and designed for administrators; Google Apps has the feel of a service that has grown by leaps and bounds, but sometimes in a rather haphazard way that's not always consistent.

In the end, the two services are both powerful but they suit different audiences.

In the end, the two services are both powerful but they suit different audiences. If your business already uses Microsoft tools, Office 365 is the logical progression, giving you server workloads that integrate with and make the most of your existing investments. It's a comprehensive, powerful, end-to-end cloud platform for business that doesn't make you do everything online, which many businesses find a step too far. You can have all the power of Exchange and SharePoint without the bother of configuring and running them.

If you need a mix of on-premise and cloud services, having to manage both Active Directory and the Google Apps control panel is more work than being able to do everything through System Center. Google Apps is a better fit for businesses starting from scratch online with no legacy systems who can benefit from the simplicity without having to keep the service in sync with on-premise tools, but it has definite limits.

MICROSOFT OFFICE 365 SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Operating system: Windows XP SP3 or later; MacOS X Leopard 10.5 or later; Windows Server 2003 or later Office client: Office 2007 SP2; Office 2008 or later; Lync 2010 Administration and Office Web Apps: a modern web browser Active Directory-based features: single forest GOOGLE APPS SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS Modern web browser

Microsoft Office is arguably one of the most important suite of programs available for the Mac. Despite the increasing number of competitors, such as Apple's iWork or the free OpenOffice, without Microsoft Office, the Mac would arguably not be viable as a business computer. This makes the latest 2011 version of Office especially important.

Each of the Office programs is full of features and foibles, so we've dedicated individual reviews to each one:Word 2011Excel 2011PowerPoint 2011Outlook 2011

The biggest change in this version of Office is the replacement of the previous email program, Entourage, with a brand-new Mac version of Outlook. There are plenty of changes affecting the entire suite though. Among them is the Ribbon interface, which will be familiar to Office 2007 and 2010 Office for Windows users. It is designed to make it easier for users to discover and use the wealth of available features in each program. The Visual Basic for Applications scripting language for creating macros has returned - an especially important feature for Excel power users.

A less noticeable and potentially less welcome change is the introduction of product activation to Office. Previous versions simply required a license key, but Office 2011 now has to validate itself with Microsoft's servers during installation before it will work so you therefore can't use the same licence non-concurrently on a desktop and a laptop as you could with previous versions. Although an understandable counter-piracy measure, it could be inconvenient if you have to deploy Office on an office full of computers.

The biggest competitor to Office is now the Google Apps online suite. Although not as fully featured as Office, and therefore not as capable at creating complex documents, it has proven very attractive to many businesses. This is due not only to its low cost, but also due to its web-based nature allowing easy remote access, lack of maintenance and, most importantly, allowing multiple people to work on a document simultaneously.

Companies that have stuck with older Macs will be left out in the cold. Office 2011 requires Macs running Mac OS X Leopard 10.5.8 or later on an Intel processor. Laggards still using PowerPC Macs and Mac OS X Tiger 10.4 will have to be content with Office 2008, but if you're still using such old computers then it's likely you're not too fussed about keeping up with the latest software releases.

Unlike its competitors, Office isn't cheap. We've reviewed the Home and Business Edition which comes with Outlook. A single user licence costs 162 ex VAT. If you don't need Outlook, the Home and Student Edition single user licence costs 72 ex VAT a significant drop. Word, Excel and PowerPoint (but not Outlook) are each available separately at 85 ex VAT. If you need any two of them however, it's more economical to simply buy the entire suite.

Verdict

None of the improvements in Office 2011 for Mac are revolutionary, but they are nonetheless useful and together make Office 2011 the best Mac office suite yet. It's not perfect though – there are still features found in Office 2010 for Windows that aren't present here. Plus, the accompanying Office Web Apps are inferior to Google Apps for collaborating online. If your document creation needs are fairly simple, OpenOffice, iWork or Google Docs is more than sufficient, but for serious work then there's no choice other than Microsoft Office 2011.

Processor: Intel only Memory: 1GB (minimum) Hard disk: Mac OS Extended disk with 1.8GB free space Display: 1,280 x 800 pixel resolution or higher OS: Mac OS X 10.5.8 or later

Next year, Microsoft will release a new version of its Office suite, which will imaginatively be called Office 2010. However, you don't have to wait that long the beta is available to download now.

Another version of Office? Really, another one?

You might have just got used to Office 2007 but hold onto your hats as here comes another one. It's not the final release though, which will actually will be out in 2010 as the name suggest, but it's beta, so at least you can try it for free now.

Where can I get the beta and how long can I use it for?

You can download the beta from here and you can use it until 31 October 2010 when it is set to expire.

What versions will be available?

There are three versions Office 2010 and each one will be available as a separate beta. Office Home and Business will include, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and Outlook, Office Professional will add Publisher, and Professional Plus will further add InfoPath, Communicator, and SharePoint Workspace.

So what's new in Office 2010?

Every application has had some kind of work done but some have changed more than others. Highlights include Outlook now being able to handle more than one Exchange account and getting threaded messaging support. OneNote is now available in all SKUs and had enhanced sharing features for SharePoint users. Video now works properly in PowerPoint. Word and PowerPoint also now get a co-authoring mode, and image tools are enhanced so you don't need to leave word to work on pictures.

There's also an enhanced Backstage' the place across all apps where you click to do basic tasks such as printing but also to connect to web services and edit metadata.

Oh, and it looks prettier too. Visual tweakery includes an improved and updated ribbon interface, with enhanced colours to make things clearer to see.

For the full low-down, check out our review of the betahere.

OK, that's all fine but I thought all apps were online now?

While some organisations may have moved to cloud computing-style services such as Google Docs, Microsoft is only going to go that way fully when it's good and ready. In the meantime, it's got another client side application suite to sell you, and yes, that's Office 2010, also known as the Cash Cow.

However, it isn't ignoring the cloud - part and parcel of the new release are the new Web Apps, which are online versions of your favourite Office Apps. Well, Word, Excel and PowerPoint anyway. The main idea is that you'll be able to work on and offline more easily, share documents and collaborate with colleagues. The Web Apps will work in IE and Firefox, but not Chrome or Safari.

Will I have to upgrade my hardware?

Probably not. This is the first office suite to be available in both 32-bit and 64-bit versions, but all processors sold in the last few years are 64-bit compliant so that shouldn't be a problem. 500MHz and 256MB of RAM are listed at the minimum requirements, but we'd recommend at least a 1GHz CPU and 1GB of RAM to get the best out of it.

Can't I just stick with Wordpad?

Actually no. All new PCs will ship with a free, though ad-supported and heavily cut-down version of Office 2010, called Microsoft Office Starter 2010. It will look like Office 2010 with a Ribbon interface, but you'll be able to upgrade directly from it to full Office, in case you feel that Microsoft isn't rich enough.

Demon Internet has suffered an embarrassing data protection failure, after an email sent to customers attached a spreadsheet with the personal details of more than 3,600 customers.

Demon, which serves both homes and businesses, confirmed that the customer information of a number of customers signed up to Demon's new paperless billing platform had been circulated, in error, as an email attachment.

Sister site PC Pro said it contained the full name of the customers, email addresses, telephone numbers and the names of the customers' businesses, with police forces and NHS trusts among the email addresses listed.

In a statement from Demon Internet's parent company Thus, the incident was blamed on "human error", but it was made clear that the spreadsheet did not contain any financial or payment information.

"On discovery, Demon took immediate steps to secure the information and security of customers affected, by changing all affected customer usernames and passwords," the statement read.

"We can confirm categorically that no customer accounts were accessed inappropriately during this time," it added.

The company apologised and said it would review all processes and procedures to ensure that the incident wouldn't be repeated.