How Excel is Used in Real-World Data Analysis

What is Excel?

Well, the simplest answer? Excel is a tool.
You might ask, which tool?
Think of it as a bookshelf, or the wardrobe in your house.
What does the bookshelf and the wardrobe have in common? Partitions.
Most bookshelves have identifiers to help you locate the exact partition where the book is stored. The last library I visited had letters and numbers. The letters were written horizontally (from left to right) across the bookshelf and the numbers were written vertically (from top to bottom). I could easily identify the exact partition by using the letter and number combination, for example the first partition in the bookshelf was A1. This is the exact way Excel is organized with letters and numbers.

The partition A1 in the bookshelf represents a cell in Excel. The horizontal letters (from left to right) of the bookshelf represent a row in an Excel, and the vertical numbers from top to bottom in a bookshelf represent a column in an Excel. A single bookshelf represents a worksheet in Excel and several bookshelves represent a workbook in Excel. Simple right?

How Excel is used in real world Data Analysis.

You have probably heard of the phrase “data is the new oil” right? What makes it the new oil? Apart from it being the new “money printer”, data is the “know it all”, it is the real story teller. However, before data can tell you stories and turn into your cash machine, you must first make sense of it, to understand what happened and why it happened. The process of understanding what happened and why it happened is called Data Analysis. By understanding what happened and why it happened, you can easily figure out what will happen (Data Science). Excel is fundamental in the understanding phase, and in the figuring out phase, because it acts as the story for the data to be understood and figured out.

Which areas do we then use Excel in the real world? Imagine this scenario, you are running a small refurbished laptops resale shop, every laptop you sell with a small profit on top of the purchase price, and making profits in your head. However, at the end of the month you find out you are short of cash to pay bills forcing you to borrow money from friends, yet, you did not sell any laptop at a loss. What do you do? This is where Excel comes in. Excel can help you to store your sales data, organize the data and clean the data. Excel also gives you formulas such as SUM, AVERAGE, MIN, MAX, COUNT and functions such as IF, SUMIF, AVERAGEIFS, VLOOKUP which you can use to do calculations and create logics to see how your business is doing. Excel also has pivot table functionality which is helpful in summarizing data quickly. You can also draw insights from the data using the various visualization tools in Excel such as charts and graphs to help you see where you are losing money and make informed decisions.

How has learning Excel changed how I see data?

Learning Excel and understanding its capabilities has been an eye opener, and I now view every instance of my life as a data point to be tracked and understood. This past week I have started tracking simple things in my life like the time I go to bed, the time I wake up, how long I take on a task, and so much more. I will be using this data to improve and be a better person.