How Excel is Used in Real-World Data Analysis

Benjamin Ochieng — Sat, 06 Jun 2026 17:29:40 +0000

Prior to taking this course, I believed that Excel was simply another table. A common place where people left numbers when they were not sure what to do with them. I can honestly say after a few weeks, that was an embarrassing mistake.
Excel is one of the applications developed by Microsoft that is used for spread sheets. The fundamental idea is that it enables you to collect, organize, calculate and visualize data, without writing a single line of code. It's ubiquitous, so much so, that one might find it in finance teams, HR departments, hospitals, construction companies and small businesses across Kenya and the world.
Financial Reporting & Budget Tracking
A common application of Excel in the real world is financial reporting. Organizations rely on it to monitor revenues and expenditure, create budget projections, and monitor performance relative to a specific goal. This is easily managed with Excel because it can hold a lot of many to many transactional data, and has the ability to auto calculate differences, percentages, and totals. When a company performs a comparison of revenue for this quarter against the same quarter last year, it's pretty sure doing it in EXCEL.
HR and Workforce Data
HR teams use Excel to keep records of employees, from salaries to departments, hire dates, employee performance scores, etc. This is the type of data I used in our data cleansing that I used to work with. I saw blank salary fields, children aged 4 years old, and hire dates such as 31st April (which is not a valid date) was a clear indicator of the value of clean data. Bad inputs create bad outputs, and Excel can help you catch and correct the issues before they get to the people who have to make the decisions.
Project Tracking and Timeline Management
In construction and project-based industries (which I am familiar with working as a site engineer) Excel is used to track milestones, resource allocation and working days are calculated. One of the functions that I found interesting this week is NETWORKDAYS. It works out the business day count between two dates, automatically excluding weekends and public holidays. For project managers creating delivery schedules, that's a time-saving function for counting by hand hours.
What Changing My Mind Felt Like is about.
My transition was more to the learning of formulas than anything else. The realization that Excel is where raw data becomes useful. When I used AVERAGE and MEDIAN to fill in missing values, or MODE to determine the most frequently occurring value in a column, I was not simply performing calculations, but making decisions about what the data should be telling me. That's a responsibility that alters the way you think about numbers.
A person's cleaning of the data determines the trustworthiness of the data. That cleaning occurs in the pages of Excel — and now I see why it's important to get it right.

DEV Community: Benjamin Ochieng

How Excel is Used in Real-World Data Analysis