Microsoft Excel used to face some serious competition from Lotus 1-2-3, but it's had the spreadsheet market sewn up for quite some time now, and with good reason. Excel is a powerful yet easy-to-use spreadsheet program that just seems to get better with every upgrade.

One of the most difficult parts of building complex spreadsheets is debugging formulas. Excel includes an Evaluate Formula tool that can help you track down bugs in your expressions. If the formula you're debugging refers to other formulas in your spreadsheet, the Evaluate Formula tool can step in to the formulas to check their current values. Other formula debugging tools allow you to audit formulas and the values they produce in your spreadsheet.

Excel supports smart tags (links to external data), and includes tags you can use to reference dates, stock symbols, or persons. For example, you can use a stock symbol smart tag to look up and display the current price of a stock. Additional smart tags are available for downloading from the Microsoft web site and from third-party developers.

Excel 2003 doesn't offer a lot that's new from Excel XP, so unless you need a specific new feature, there's not a lot of reason to upgrade. The most important new feature for business users is XML support. Excel can save, read, and interchange data in XML format, so you can exchange information with a corporate database, or repurpose data for business presentations or the corporate web site.

A new compare side-by-side tool, similar to the new Compare Documents feature in Microsoft Word, makes it easy to compare and work in two different worksheets.

Also new is a List tool, which lets you draw a border around a column to specify it as a list. Entering data into the last cell, which will be marked with an asterisk, will expand the list by one row. You can sort the list in ascending or descending order, or by using a custom filter. If you've set the list to automatically create a total at the bottom, a clickable arrow will display the function that will be used to arrive at that total, such as Sum, Count, Max, Min, or Average.

Pro: Easy for beginners to use, yet offers a powerful collection of tools for advanced users.
Con: Requires Windows 2000 or Windows XP.