Most of the major improvements in Microsoft Excel 2003 involve workgroup functions, but there are a few enhancements that may tempt individual users to upgrade.

The key new Excel enhancement—XML, IRM (information rights management), and SharePoint aside—is its new List feature. This addresses some of the problems traditionally associated with lists—including the fact that the SUM function didn’t work as you might expect on filtered lists. Once you’ve created an Excel 2003 list by clicking on Data | List | Create List, it’s surrounded with a blue border showing clearly where it begins and ends. The last row in the list contains a single asterisk, much as you’d see in an Access table. Entering data in any cell in that row (within the list) inserts a new row in the list.

Every column has the AutoFilter enabled by default, which lets you quickly filter and sort the list. Totaling a column is as easy as clicking the Toggle Total Row button on the new List toolbar and choosing one of a range of functions for each column, such as Sum, Count, Average, Max, or Min. Excel lists can be published to a SharePoint site, keeping the local and server copies in sync if required.

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There is a new Compare Worksheets feature, which you use by opening two workbooks and then choosing the Compare Side by Side option from the Window menu. Excel stacks the sheets vertically and, like Word, synchronizes them so moving around in one worksheet scrolls the other, letting you compare their contents easily.

A range of statistical functions—VAR, STDEV, STDEVP, DVAR, FORECAST, SLOPE, INTERCEPT, PEARSON, RSQ, STEYX, and others—have been fixed by changing how they are calculated, to reduce the likelihood they will return incorrect answers. In earlier versions, these functions were known to fail, because of the rounding required where large numbers were involved.

Other changes include a new Date Smart Tag, which lets you schedule a meeting or display your Outlook Calendar. And a new Person Name Smart Tag lets you get data from an Outlook contact you’ve recently e-mailed. As with Word, Excel users can remove personal data from a workbook before saving it— although the option is disabled by default. To enable it, choose Tools | Options | Security.

Microsoft Windows’ market share is on the verge of falling below 90 percent this year, according to the latest data from Net Applications, diluted by the uptake of alternative mobile operating systems.

Windows’ market share, which includes its mobile Windows OS performance, sank to 90.29 percent in December 2010, down from 92.21 percent the year before.

Meanwhile Apple’s Mac and iOS platforms took 5.02 percent and 1.69 percent respectively last month. Mac OS share was down from its peak of 5.27 percent in October 2009, while iOS adoption more than doubled last year, when Apple sold millions of iPhones and iPads. The rest of the operating systems – Linux, Java ME, and ‘others’ – accounted for three percent of the pie.

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Vince Vizzaccaro, executive vice president of marketing at Net Applications, said growth in smartphone and tablet browsing posed perhaps the greatest influence on Windows’ performance.

“With a full HTML browser and multi-touch interface, the iPhone was the first mobile device to see rapid growth in browser usage,” Vizzaccaro said. “Apple has expanded on that success with iPad and iPod browsing, so that iOS is now the third most used operating system in the Internet. Since the introduction of the original iPhone, everyone else has been trying to catch up with Apple.”

Microsoft’s end-of-year Windows Phone 7 devices and Windows 7 tablets, meanwhile, have yet to make a major dent in the mobile operating system space.

But Vizzaccaro says things could heat up this year as the economy improves, and consumers finally replace outdated Windows models with newer ones. “While there is no guarantees who will benefit from this the most, we could see a growth spurt in Windows 7 usage,” he says.

The latest data from Net Applications comes from monitoring traffic into 40,000 different websites.