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Danson Kuria
Danson Kuria

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Introduction to Excel: The Usage of Excel in Real World data analysis.

In the age of data driven business, the information gathered on a daily basis is tremendous. Data analysis tools have been of immense importance in turning data into valuable insights for the professionals. Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application that helps you analyze, visualize, organize and manage data with ease. It has found extensive use in many different scenarios.

Business decision making is one of the areas that uses Excel on a large scale. In order to know how their business is doing and making informed decision, businesses track their sales and monitor the overall performance of their product by analysis of the relevant data collected in their excel worksheets. It can help businesses determine which of their products are selling more and where in the business needs to work.

Financial reports and budgeting have been some of the major uses of Excel. Businesses collect, record and manage their finances on Excel. It can help organizations manage and operate efficiently. Excel helps organizations to track their income, expenses and losses and to create budgets and produce financial reports.

Marketing data analysis has also come a long way with Excel. The sales and marketing professionals have the ability to gather data from various campaigns and then analyze it using Excel in order to track performance indicators such as sales conversions and return on investment to make improvements in marketing efforts.

My experience in learning Excel during first week has made me aware of certain important functions and aspects of excel. Sorting, which helps us arrange data in a readable order and cleaning, which is very important in identifying and removing errors from the data and making it understandable for the purpose of analysis have become a vital component to me.

I was also made aware of data sets, rows and columns that form the structure of data. A data set is a collection of related information that is structured in a table. Rows represent different entries/records whereas the columns provide information of one particular type. Understanding this structure has become very important in data analysis.

I was introduced to useful formulas such as Sum (), average () and count () which help the analysts do quick calculation on the data set. These formulas provide quick analysis on data sets.

Learning excel has changed my perspective on data, which earlier appeared as merely numbers and text. But now I know that data can actually narrate meaningful stories and help make logical decision. I have learned that organizing, cleaning and analysis of data are of critical importance. This first week has laid a strong foundation for my future learning process.

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Brigid Chepkemoi

Good effort. The article is clear and well organized, but it feels a bit general and slightly AI-generated; please add screenshots, practical Excel examples, and a personal class example showing how you used sorting, cleaning, SUM, AVERAGE, or COUNT on an actual dataset.