Microsoft made a preview of Excel for Android available. I tested it and noted quite a few things :
- it is a 125 MB download. It is amazing these days how big things get. And I am making the assumption that most of those 125 MB is just icons and bitmaps.
- it tries to get you wired up to Microsoft accounts and other such nonsense rather than actually show the working area. I don't think this shows much respect for users and it is quite obvious that Microsoft is using Excel for something else : to get users wired up to their cloud services. I think users should be presented with the option of downloading from cloud services at the time of opening an existing spreadsheet in the corresponding dialog, not upfront. So right when applicable, not pushed to your face.
- the software itself is totally unfit for anything other than consumption. Entering data in cells is a nightmare. Don't even think about making formatting changes. For creating charts, Microsoft chose to restrict the editing to the choosing of a predefined chart style. Not entirely bad as a principle, but cannot be advertised for its editing capabilities either. Contrary to the desktop, Excel for android is made simplistic, which is not the same than simple for most users and powerful for demanding users.
- hard and slow. Very slow. Excruciably slow.
- of course there are no VBA macros capabilities. Why is this thing even called Excel then?
- I have yet to test the loading of any existing Excel spreadsheet. And I have yet to see what happens with fairly loaded (i.e. actual business cases) spreadsheets, but I am not holding my breath. I expect Excel will simply crash.