Today I'm going to show you how you can use Microsoft Excel for free. And not just Excel but
all other Office apps, like Word, PowerPoint, even Outlook. And we're also going to cover what you're missing out on when you're using the free
version of Excel compared to a paid Microsoft 365 subscription. This way you can decide for yourself if a subscription makes
sense for you or not. (upbeat music) With the free version of Excel, you'll essentially use Excel for the web. I'm going to show you in a
second how this looks like but first, let's cover
how you can access it. All you need is an internet connection. With your browser of choice, just navigate to Office.com and click on sign in. Enter the information and password for your Microsoft account. If you don't have one, you can
easily create one for free. Just click here. Once you're signed in, it's going to take you to
the home screen of Office. In the middle, you'll see
your most recent documents, as well as pinned documents and items that are shared with you. On the left, you have all the
apps that you have access to. These include classical Office apps, like Word, Excel, PowerPoint to Outlook, OneNote and Skype, all available to you for free. But let's check out Excel. Click on the icon on the left and let's create a new workbook by clicking on the plus here. This opens Excel for the web. As you can see, it looks a lot
like the Excel Desktop app. It has the look and feel
of the Excel we all know and it offers almost all
the major features you have on Desktop version. Best part is you have access
to the most recent functions, functions like XLOOKUP,
SORT, FILTER, UNIQUE and LET. These will make your data analysis and preparation so much easier. You can also create
PivotTables on your dataset and quickly analyze
your data without having to write a single formula. You can also visualize
your data with charts. Obviously because it's online, you need to be connected to the internet. You can't do any offline editing. So if you want to edit an existing file that you saved locally, you'll
have to upload it first. You can easily do that by
clicking Upload and Open. Now, the main advantage of working online is better collaboration. You and others can edit the same document with co-authoring and all changes are going to be reflected in real time. Now, speaking of changes, in Excel for the web, all of the changes you make are autosaved. Now, this can take some
time getting used to because for me, I had a bad habit of opening finalist files, doing some tests on them and then closing them without saving because I didn't want to make
changes to the finalist file. I had to teach myself to save a copy or create a copied version for testing when I'm using Excel on the web. Fortunately, you can also
easily restore older versions of the file by going to Info and then selecting Previous Versions. So why would you need the
paid version of Excel? What's missing in Excel for the web? Let's cover the main topics. Number one, data import
and data transformation. Probably the biggest difference
between paid and free is the ability to import,
clean and transform data. I'm a huge fan of get & Transform, also known as Power Query. This for me is one of the
best features in Excel. It's like an instant miracle cure to your difficult data analysis problems. You can quickly combine and
consolidate large datasets from different sources. You can convert downloads from ERP systems or messy data into information you can use and replace complex formulas
with just a few clicks. Unfortunately, in the online version, this functionality is completely missing. There is currently no possibility to import from external sources, like CSV or text files
or other database files. So unfortunately, no Power
Query in the free version. What's available though are data types, so at least you can import stock prices and geography data. Number two, Excel VBA and macros. VBA and macros are tools
that many Excel users rely on when it comes to automating tasks or creating professional
Excel applications. But this code was developed
for Desktop solutions and it doesn't work for Excel on the web. Now, you can still access
spreadsheets with macros, using Excel Online but
you can't run any macros. So does this mean that
you can't automate any of your repetitive tasks
in Excel for the web? Not quite. You have to go about
it in a different way. And here is another difference
to the paid version. If you have a 365 Business subscription, and you access Excel for the web, you're going to see an
additional tab that's not there in the free version, Automate. Now, you will only see this though if the functionality was made available by your global admin. If it's available for you, you can create automations
with Office scripts. So similar to Excel macros, you have the ability
to record your actions or add your own code. The code is called Office Script and it's written in
TypeScript or JavaScript. This is a relatively new feature and it's expanding and getting
better with every update. The great thing about Office Scripts is that it can be run
through Power Automate, which means that your workbook can be updated through scheduled or event-driven flows. With VBA, you need to
generally open your workbook to run your macro. With Power Automate, you
can trigger your workflows without having to open Excel. Number three, graphics and visualization. Excel 365 in the Desktop version offers premium visualization to spice up your spreadsheets. It has a good library
of vector graphic icons, which you can find in the Insert tab. In addition, you get
thousands of royalty-free, high-quality images, cut-out people with transparent background
in different poses. You also get stickers
and other illustrations. None of this is available
online, at least not yet. Unfortunately, also 3D models
and WordArt are missing. As for charts, most of the common charts are available also online. You have the usual 2-D Column charts, line charts, pie and bar charts, area and scatter charts. Under Other Charts, you'll find waterfall and even the newer hierarchical charts, like tree map and sunburst. You also have conditional
formatting functionality, although you can't format values based on a formula like you can
in the Desktop version. Also at least not yet. So if you're using a lot of visual elements in your spreadsheets, this may be quite limiting. There are a few other
things now I want to mention because they can be quite annoying when you work with the online version. For instance, it doesn't support
password-protected files. You can open them on the web after entering the password but you are going to get an error message about unsupported features
that looks like this. And it's going to open
the file in viewing mode, meaning you can't make any changes to it. There is also a restriction of file size and if you try to open really large files, you get an error message like this one, informing you that you're going to need to open this file in the Desktop version. So to summarize, the free Excel for the web offers most features and functions that we're used
to from the Desktop version. The main differences are
the lack of data import and transforming functionality. Also the missing automation possibilities. We also have fewer features
for data visualization in Excel Online. On the plus side though, you get additional collaboration abilities with co-authoring, and
you get to use Excel, basically most of Excel's
features for free. I hope this video was helpful to decide for yourself
if Excel for the web may be a possible solution for you. As always, if you like this video, please give it a thumbs up and if you enjoy what you see here and you're learning something new, consider subscribing to this channel. I'm going to see you in the next video. (upbeat music)
