I am currently doing a major in civil engineering but over this summer break, I decided to do something exciting. To expand my knowledge in tech. I have enrolled for a short course in Data Analysis. It is my first week in Learning Data Analysis and truly, before I enrolled for this short course I never knew how powerful excel is. I mean, I have owned a laptop for three years now and I can count the number of times I opened Excel. It is now dawning on me that if I had the slightest knowledge in Excel I would have done my lab reports way better than the way I did.
Looking now at Excel, I see it more than just a set of spreadsheets. The world as it is now with loads of Data calls for a need of making data-driven decisions. It is now said that data is the new oil, the currency of the new era and this requires us to be data literate. Excel is a gateway to data literacy.
As I delve deeper into Excel, I realize it can be used in many ways. For instance, In Business, companies can leverage on the use Excel to track sales, to forecast future performance by analyzing trends and compare different business strategies. In weather survey, Excel can be used to store recorded data, analyze the data and give a prediction based on the data. This can come in handy especially when studying rain patterns and hydro-logical surveys. For students like myself, we can use excel in doing the lab reports that are data intensive such as data in soil stability. Excel does have a neat way of summarizing the data in charts and graphs in a way that eases interpretation.
Apart from doing average, sum, getting mode and median, I really learnt something fascinating as I was doing my assignment. There was a task to comment on the ratings of products. Products with less than three were to get a “poor” those with between 3 and 4 were to get an “Average” and those with more than 4 were to get an “Excellent”. Getting this command was a hard nut to crack but eventually I cracked it. After hours.
Take a look of the command;
=IF(ISBLANK(H4),"",IF(H4<3,"Poor",IF(AND(H4>=3,H4<4),"Average",IF(H4>=4,"Excellent",))))
Well, Excel is magic. Though I wish it had a dark mode. Ha!
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