How Excel is Used in Real-word Data Analysis

Excel is a customizable spreadsheet program which is commonly used across different sectors in the world to save and analyse numerical data but as well store or record text data.
Excel has been employed by the different actors mostly customized to serve the purpose as intended. For instance, in the business world its been used to influence business decisions to know the best performing product by employing excel functions like Sum, Ifs then reported in financial reports and then based on to drive marketing.
For years I have always considered myself a guru in excel not until I started classes at Luxdev Academy I was literally humbled by how much I didn’t know about excel but also learnt the different ways of doing certain processes like data cleaning which are way simpler, clean and professional suitable for large data sets as well.
In my first week at Luxdev Academy, we were taken through the basics of excel and at first, I thought it was a waste of time to learn excel that I thought I already knew however, I learnt new formulas like DATEDIF, AVERAGEIF and COUNTIFS that I honestly had other ways of going around them but the class really helped me find a simpler way. Additionally, the class reminded me of excel features that I long taken without using or even forgot about for example using the removing duplicates automatically and the different ways of applying data validation.
Taking on Excel class again, with real world data and also having dealt with a number of datasets over the years ever since I finished school and joined the workforce it has given me a different view on how to deal with my data from now on. For instance, the data cleaning process and also seeking a second or third eye to take a look at your cleaned data before you proceed with the analysis. I having been cleaning data and proceeding with analysis and honestly, I would realize mistakes later after publishing and sharing the report with my bosses and clients. So, my first week at Luxdev Academy even when at first when thought since its all about Excel would be just a walkover or even a waste of time, I can confidently say it was indeed worth the time and trouble if I may say.
To some people, excel is just excel but to business people, managers and any key decision makers its close to impossible to make informed decisions without a backing like data. So, Excel has been employed across the world by different sectors at all levels; one to develop systems that are used to collect and manage data; two to clean the collected data and then analyse it and lastly to develop reports and dashboards upon which decisions are made to improve services delivery, product quality and as well change or develop new strategies or marketing strategies to better service the customers.