Excel: The ELEPHANT in the room!

What do you think Excel is? Rows and Columns? Playing with numbers, charts and graphs?For me, Excel was introduced as a mandatory computer package that I had to do many years back, lucky for me, I had learnt about it in my high school.

The Computer teacher was kind enough to sometimes allow us to stay behind in the weekends and use the computers to hone our skills: an opportunity that was thoroughly abused as we perfected Sudoku and other computer games. In all this, I left my alma mater with some basic skills that sharpened me.

Excel is Microsoft Office Suite used for data collection, analysis and also computations on a day to day life of most businesses. It can be installed in most platforms ie: Windows, iOS and Android.

In business functions, Excel is used in budgeting and creating forecast models for companies to plan their cash for future. Cash flow analysis using raw data can be used to give a company’s liquidity and position.

For market performance, Excel has been greatly used in analysing campaign data, feedback from customers and understanding their demographics to aid companies make better marketing and sales strategies.

From the ongoing trainings, I have learned on the use of some Excel functions widely used to analyse data shared. Conditional formating has helped me group data into the various groups based on specific set rules or parameters. Other functions like Data validation using drop downs, have simplified data visuals where restricts data entry based on the set parameters.

Data validation using drop downs and custom inputs, sum, average and mean are also other functions which I have used to manipulate data and break down into simpler terms easy for data analysis.Learning Excel has opened new frontiers in the world of data, with more functions yet to be covered.

It is quite evident that most users barely scratch the surface in Excel usage, with most users restricting themselves to basic commands for their data, neglecting opportunities in data patterns and visualisations with in Excel.

By leveraging use of simple functions and commands, basic arithmetic functions have now become easy and I am able to complete taks at a faster rate while mainting data accuracy. Looking forward to more Excel interactions with my peers and getting to learn new possibilities on it.