Sidebar: How to Excel

Business-school students live in Excel. The Microsoft spreadsheet is the tool kit most students use to crunch numbers, justify business plans, and scrutinize cases. But the standard Excel 97 (and this year's upgrade, Excel 2000) isn't enough to get you through two years of B-school. People in the know turn to add-ins to augment Excel's capabilities:

Only quant jocks bother with handheld calculators. Almost everyone else uses Abacus, an Excel add-in from Advanced Numerical Methods Ltd. Abacus has a calculator interface and a large library of built-in mathematical and conversion equations. Using Abacus, you can enter complex formulas right into Excel -- and lose that calculator.

Coordinates: $29.95. Abacus, www.numericalmethods.com

Trying to forecast using spreadsheet scenarios? Check out Crystal Ball, another Excel add-in that uses a simulation called Monte Carlo to analyze the risks and uncertainties associated with your spreadsheet models. Just choose a range for each uncertain value in your spreadsheet, and Crystal Ball performs hundreds of what-if analyses and displays the results in a graph.

Coordinates: $495. Crystal Ball, www.decisioneering.com

SprEDGAR for Excel, from SprEDGAR Software, is especially useful for second-year students doing due diligence on a prospective employer. SprEDGAR calculates and graphs 30 standard financial ratios from a company's 10-K and 10-Q filings that are stored on the SEC's EDGAR database, so you can quickly evaluate a company's profitability.

Coordinates: $49.95. SprEDGAR, www.spredgar.com

Sidebar: Study Groupware

The toughest part of working on a team project is getting the team members together. "People are hard to reach," says Harvard's Bob Dreyer. "It's not like we're all in an office from 9 am to 5 pm." But wired students stay connected thanks to instant messaging, an Internet application that lets them communicate in real time from their browsers.

Think of instant messaging as a pager for the Internet. Many students use Yahoo! Messenger, which is a service from Yahoo!, because they get their Internet gateways from their university. Once you've registered and received a Messenger id, the Windows version will take you about 10 minutes to download. (Macintosh and Unix computers run a Java version, which doesn't require a download.)

The first order of business is to input your list of "friends" -- teammates and classmates who are also using Messenger. After that, you'll get an instant alert whenever a team member (who's also registered on Yahoo!) logs on. To communicate, just type a message to the people you want to reach. Messenger is less than ideal for swapping big brain dumps, because you can't attach large files from programs like Excel. But you can't beat it for brainstorming with the rest of your team.

A bonus for Mac and Unix users: Messenger's Java applet resides on the Web, so it's not location-specific. Just type in your Messenger id, and you can send messages from any computer that's also running Messenger. Web-based instant messaging. Pretty cool.

Coordinates: Free. Yahoo! Messenger, messenger.yahoo.com

Sidebar: First-Year Advice

Name: Sarah Heckscher, graduated in June, Northwestern University's Kellogg School of Management

In Beta: Helped launch the business-development team for Kaiser Permanente's medical group.

Campus Networking: Cochair of Kellogg's High-Tech Club and an instructor at TekCamp, a technology workshop for new students.

First-Year Advice: Recruiters will want to send you a fax, so check out Panasonic's PC/Fax Store. It records a fax that comes in over your phone line, so you can download the fax to your laptop later on. You don't have to be online to receive the fax -- and you don't have to buy a fax machine.

Name: Edward Batista, second year, Stanford Graduate School of Business

In Beta: Helped launch the Homeless Children's Network, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco.

Campus Networking: Organized 15 dinner seminars featuring high-tech heavy hitters for Stanford's Entrepreneurship Club.

First-Year Advice: The ability to do advanced Web research that's free of charge is one of the best perks at business school. Once you've graduated, you'll have to pay for subscription-based research from companies like the Gartner Group and Forrester Research, so take advantage of it while you're still in school.

Name: Rob Bailey, graduated in June, MIT's Sloan School of Management

In Beta: Spent two-and-a-half years leading product-development initiatives for e-commerce at Banamex-Accival SA, one of the largest banks in Latin America.