What is it and what can I do with excel

Microsoft Excel is one of the most known and used spreadsheet software; we can use it to perform calculation, analyze data, but also to prepare well printed reports with data, text and graphics.

Excel is the spreadsheet software included in the well-known Microsoft Office package; it’s one of the most known and used software around the world, especially for business.
So what is it for? What’s its place in our productivity toolset? For what should we use excel? For what word? Power point?
Not so many years ago we could say:

• You need spreadsheet program to perform calculation on data in tabular form, graph results, keep lists and other table formatted datasets to filter, sort, retrieve;
• You need a word processor to get a well written, spell and grammar checked text document to print nicely with page numbers, indexes, table of content;
• You need a desktop publishing program to get a nice looking page with images and text;

Today we can say:

• With a word processor you can write text, apply your preferred format (font, color, alignment, etc.) and perform spell checking, but you can do the same in excel as well. Can you drop your favorite word processor and start writing reports, articles and books with excel? Definitely not, but when you have to present data and numbers you can put in well written and formatted text as well to produce more relevant reports.
• With desktop publishing software you can edit page layouts, put backgrounds, images and text and get a beautiful print. But you can do the same in Excel, so can you use excel for desktop publishing? I advise not, but when you have data, calculation charts you can arrange them to produce a nice formatted printed report all in Excel.

So, if we say Excel is spreadsheet we are not wrong, but we are leaving out many features; then let’s say it is a useful tool to easily perform calculation with the added capability to arrange the result for clear and nice printed reports with text, graphs and images. This way it sounds like we are talking about a powerful data processing and reporting tool …which is what I think it is, especially if we add to our list the built-in feature to query and process data from various databases with tools like query, pivot tables, power pivot and many other tools we will be discussing in other articles.
This blog will discuss about Excel, how it is a good tool when we have to process number and data, but especially how it is a good tool when we need to make sense of numbers and data.