Day 13 - Microsoft Excel 2013 on the Surface RT for Teachers

30 Days with a Surface RT for Teachers
Teaching and Learning with a Windows 8 Tablet

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program that is a very valuable addition for teachers working with numbers in the classroom.  Whether you are just keeping track of student grades in a simple spreadsheet or collecting data for a Science experiment Excel is the best program for crunching numbers on the Surface RT.

I have taught Excel to teachers in the past and one of the nice features of using the Surface RT is the support of inking. Drawing the attention of the students eye to an area of the screen that you want the student to understand is very important when teaching someone something new. Yesterday, I shared that Word 2013 supports inking and how valuable it can be to annotate student work. The same is true for inking and Excel 2013. Being able to make handwritten notes next to formulas on an Excel spreadsheet makes the instruction much clearer than giving just oral instructions.

You get to inking in Excel 2013 similar to Word 2013. Go to the REVIEW Tab on the ribbon and select START INKING.

There are a couple of oddities that I have found in switching back and forth between inking and mouse mode when using Excel 2013. I sometimes have to double-click to select a specific cell when normally a single-click would do. I also have to sometimes press the ESC (Escape) Key to deselect something. It seems that Excel 2013 is not as fully baked as other programs so I expect Microsoft to continue to improve the ARM-based version to catch it up to the fully capable x86 version.

Unlike Word, Excel 2013 does not support pinch and zoom on the Surface RT. There is however a slider bar in the lower right-hand corner that allows you to slide for different zoom levels. Microsoft Word 2013 also has this zoom slider but I much prefer the pinch and zoom capability.

Of all the Office 2013 apps Excel seems to be the least touch friendly. I have had occasions where Excel will stutter and it sometimes does not seem to be as responsive to touch as the other Office 2013 applications. When using my fat fingers to move from cell to cell I really need to zoom in to get better accuracy.

Excel 2013 is the one app that causes me to reach for my Arc Mouse so I can use it as a traditional Desktop application. The Arc Mouse uses a wireless transceiver that I plug into the Surface RTs USB Port. The Arc Mouse gives me pinpoint accuracy when using Excel 2013 and makes for a much more pleasurable experience. I recommend finding a mouse if you will be using Excel very much on the Surface RT.

There are also a couple of other limitations with Excel 2013, most notably the lack of support for macros. The Surface RT version of Office 2013 is a port over to the ARM-based Surface RT system. This porting is not complete as some features like macros have not yet been enabled on the RT version. If you are only doing simple calculations this won’t be a big deal to you, but if you are an accountant you may find the RT version frustrating to use. If you do need the full power of the business class Excel 2013 program the Surface Pro would be a much better choice as it supports all of Excel’s functions including macro capability.

I have also ran into a few template issues that I tried to use with Excel 2013 on the Surface RT. Some templates I have used on the RT had problems with ActiveX components. Microsoft still has some work to do here to make Excel on ARM-based devices work as well as it does on x86 systems.

Overall the ability to run Excel 2013 on a tablet like the Surface RT is a positive. There are still some rough edges on the RT version but for basic spreadsheet work this capability is a great addition to the Surface RT.

 Until next time...

Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, PhD

Follow me on Twitter @tomgrissom

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