Many of his comments are accurate, but many are not actually argued. For
instance ... Frequent user group reports of crashes and not being able to
save files ... is hardly a reasoned argument.

I think it would be hard to argue that charting is seriously flawed in 2007,
and that you either love the ribbon or you hate it, but there are serious
changes in the product that have to be objectively analysed.

The author dismisses a million rows, but clearly this has been a major user
request for many years now. It is not my idea of a major requirement, but it
clearly is for others. He also dismisses 16K columns, but most people that I
know have wanted more than 256 columns; not every day for every spreadsheet,
but certainly more. 16K may be more than we envisaged, but at least it is
more.

Table handling is changed big-time in 2007, and it is a going in the right
direction.

Conditional formatting is taken to a new level in 2007.

There are formula changes, SUMIFS, COUNTIFS, AVERAGEIF, IFERROR, etc. Whilst
I think SUMIFS, COUNTIFS is no big deal personally, they are useful, but I
like AVERAGEIF and IFERROR. And they have integrated ATP into Excel, which
is great.

Pivot tables have had a major re-vamp (not before time).

They have included a names manager (although it is nowhere near as good as
Jan Karel Pieterse's NameManager addin). Need a DV manager though IMO.

Then there are many little things, such as undo after save,  improved
filtering, formula autocomplete, resizable formula bars (I love that one),
and so on.

Of course there are downsides besides those mentioned above. Macro handling
is not great but not unworkable, F4 has been severely beaten up which is a
real bummer IMO, no tear-off toolbars, and so on again.

Overall, it is a major product change. The critical thing IMO is what they
do in the next release, what they agree is broken and therefore fix, what
they add, etc. In the meantime, you have to evaluate it as such, identify
what you may need that has been lost or functionally changed, what  new
functions that you can use, and from this you determine if you want to
upgrade. But many people buying Excel for the first time will get Excel 2007
de facto, so there will be a take-up regardless.

Personally, I would like to have seen an Excel release where they made the
functional changes first (tables, CF, pivots, etc.) in a stable version,
then did the strategy changes (ribbon, rows, etc.) in a further release.
This would have been a smoother transition and allowed time to bed the
functional changes and gives us a vastly improved non-ribbon version before
being asked to move on. But I can understand MS feeling that Excel needed a
headline grabbing change, and thus they did it all in one.

A big issue to me is the performanace degradation.  Virtually every action,
calc, macro will be a lot slower, sometimes unusably so based on reports
we're seen here.  I don't have any huge slow calcing workbooks to test the
site's claim of being 20x slower though.  I have found that a macro that
took 6 minutes to run in Excel 2003 took 13 minutes in 2007.

"In Excel 2007, if you password protect your workbooks and they contain
macros, there is no way to enable macros."

Not "no way". There is a registry entry that turns this security feature
off.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Excel\Security\ExcelBypassEncryptedMacroScan

set to 1.

The article states:
Some will love the 2007 interface, some will hate it.  Figure one to two
weeks to relearn Excel basics.  It most likely will take over a year before
you match your past productivity.

What utter rubbish!! Anyone with reasonable intelligence can learn the new,
very intuitive, interface in less than a morning and be very proficient by
the end of the day.
The ribbon is so much easier to use than the old drill down menus. If you
like using the keyboard shortcuts, they're all right there on the ribbon.
Just press the Alt key.
The new ribbon makes it so much easier to find things compared to the old
menus. I'm able to work more quickly with the ribbon as well and I like not
having to dig down through menus to get to the things I want to use.

Regarding http://www.add-ins.com/Excel%202003%20versus%202007.htm and
your astute discussion:

While that author has his "take" on rows and columns, there's no
question about what 2007 does there. Stability and whether anything will
run as fast (dual processor benefit?) may or may not be definitely
answered in time. And clearly there will be debate over the ribbon with
fans and detractors, but we already have a hard answer on that one; MS
decided it was better, and that the users would like it better.
(Moreover, some may contend that the broad-market-appeal - i.e. new
novice purchaser blood - trumped any MVP objections anyway in MS's
interface decision.) At any rate, it is what it is.

Obviously speed, stability and look and feel are crucial aspects.
Hearing your observations on those parts is valuable so thanks. Yet I'd
like to hear more about some of those specific feature "beefs." Is he
right about macros breaking, uncustomizable toolbars/ribbons except for
the quick access one, no customizable macro buttons (huh?), removed
charting features? Everyone (including novices, haha) really needs to
edit the registry to run macros on passworded workbooks?

It's worth noting again that the guy did brazenly omit positives, but we
have hundreds of articles detailing those. I just didn't hear his
specific claims mentioned on the depecated list, and wonder if he is
simply off the mark or not.