When comparing Microsoft Excel vs Twine, the Slant community recommends Twine for most people. In the question“What are the best tools for video game design?” Twine is ranked 2nd while Microsoft Excel is ranked 12th. The most important reason people chose Twine is:
The basics are very easy to grasp, and you can have a basic story up in minutes.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro PowerQuery plugin for loading data
PowerQuery adds functionality to pull and cleanse data from a variety of sources into your spreadsheet, remembering the source and cleansing workflow steps to allow the data in the sheet to be refreshed should the source data change.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=39379
Pro Easy to understand
The basics are very easy to grasp, and you can have a basic story up in minutes.
Pro Free for commercial projects
Twine is based on a GPL licence. You are free to download, modify and publish derivatives - even commercially.
Cons
Con Limited to interactive fiction
Twine is specialized to decision-based interactive fiction. Under the hood, a Twine game is just a flowchart for page transitions; the only way to add more complex behavior is to code it from scratch in JavaScript.