by someone who only wanted to do summation.
My interaction with Excel this week has shown me that working with it is similar to knowing that one person who doesn't say much but has layers to them that you begin to notice after one interaction.
Initial interaction with excel
On the surface, Excel is a spreadsheet that you organise and format data for storage; however, you find it appealing. It is quite humbling to think you are tech-savvy, then spending the next two hours trying to convert the percentages to integers.
This cordial spreadsheet holds the power to analyse, automate, model, present data, and, for the unfortunate, cause despair. One missing comma and you can't format the whole column in a dataset. Excel is excellent at data analysis, allowing users to explore trends, patterns, and outliers in datasets, which is particularly useful for departments such as sales, marketing, and finance to make informed forecasts.
Exciting features
One feature that stuck out to me was pivot tables. They are easy to navigate and are useful for grouping, filtering, and comparing different information across multiple capacities. Conditional formatting is another handy tool that highlights cells based on specific rules to gain targeted information, such as identifying underperforming sectors in a given field. The most exciting part is that with Excel, different tools can be used in combinations and permutations according to how much you know Excel.
And now,
The more I learn about Excel, the more I see data differently since structures and hidden relationships that went unnoticed are being revealed. Instead of feeling overwhelmed, you begin to ask better questions, and that is a fine indicator that you are engaging with data analytically for interpretation. Then, Excel becomes a lens to spot the missing links, or what escapes the untrained eye.