ExcelPipe

CNET Editors' review

by: CNET staff on June 30, 2009

ExcelPipe is supposedly designed to let users search through multiple MS Excel spreadsheets to find and replace special characters in one fell swoop. Unfortunately its vague and poorly designed user interface makes it extremely difficult to accomplish this task.

The user interface is extremely bland. It employs tabs with the hopes of keeping you on track, but we found they worked just the opposite. Rather, the interface lacked any kind of flow, making it difficult to navigate. What's more, the button commands and features were not at all intuitive, and we had no idea how to get started. A visit to the program's built-in Help feature provided very little guidance, as it was just as vague as the rest of the program. We went through each step of the program, guessing as we loaded search/replace list, added values, and selected where to look for special characters. But no matter how we configured our settings, the program returned an error message stating that we had to enter a file type. There was no place on the interface to add a file type and another return to the Help file once again let us down.

The program's other tabs include features for processing found files, as well as setting options, such as selecting your version of Excel, and restarting Excel after so many seconds of being unresponsive. However, since we couldn't get the program to work properly, we were unable to fully utilize these features. We recommend that users skip this poorly designed Excel management program, which proved to be more of a headache than using Excel's built-in search-and-replace capabilities.