What is Microsoft Excel, Its Benefits & Features?
Microsoft Excel is a full-featured spreadsheet program that allows you to organize data, complete calculations, make decisions, transform data to graph, and develop professional looking reports.
The three major parts of Excel are:
Worksheets – Worksheets allow you to enter, calculate, manipulate and analyse data such as numbers and text.
Charts – Charts pictorially represent data. Excel can draw two-dimensional and three-dimensional columns, charts, pie charts and other types of charts.
Databases – Databases manage data. For example, once you enter data onto a worksheet, Excel can sort the data, search for specific data, and select data that meets certain criteria.
Excel and Database Management
Excel is not a database package but has some special database features like sorting, filtering, and data retrieval, which allows users to create and manage lists. Hence, Excel is equipped to handle and manipulate small databases.
While creating a small database, two points must be noted:-
The rows of data should be continuous to facilitate the manipulation of data. That is no blank row even a column label and the first record in the database.
The names of the columns should be entered in a single cell and must be unique
Top 5 Benefits of Microsoft Excel
Build great charts:- Excel allows business users to unlock the potential of their data, by using formulas across a grid of cells.
Use conditional formatting:- Excel users can format their spreadsheets using different colour shades, bolds and italics, to differentiate between columns and bring the most important data to the fore.
Help identify trends:- When presenting data in the form of charts or graphs, it can be helpful to include average lines, which explicitly detail the key trends emerging from the information.
Bring data together:- Excel can be used to bring information from various files and documents together, so that it exists in a single location.
- Online access:- Excel is available online as part of Microsoft’s Office 365 productivity suite. This means business leaders and employees have access to the program from a range of devices, from almost any location.
Features of Microsoft Excel
Conditional Formatting:- Making sense of our data-rich, noisy world is hard but vital. That’s why the first of our Top 10 Excel Features is so important.
Pivot Tables:- At four hours to get to proficiency, you may be put off learning Pivot Tables, but don’t be. Use them to sort, count, total or average data stored in one large spreadsheet and display them in a new table, cut however you want.
Paste Special:- Grabbing (i.e., Copying) some data from one cell and pasting it into another cell is one of the most common activities in Excel.
Add Multiple Rows:- Probably one of the most frequently carried out activities in spreadsheeting. Ctrl-Shift + is the shortcut, but actually, it takes longer, so Right Click is what we recommend.
Absolute References:- Indispensable! The dollar in front of the letter fixes the column, the dollar sign in front of the number fixes the row F4 toggles through the four possible combinations.
Extend formula across/down:-The beauty of Excel is its easy scalability. Get the formula right once and Excel will churn out the right calculation a million times.
Filters:-Explore data in a table quickly. Filtering effectively hides data that is not of interest. Usually, there’s a value e.g., ‘Blue cars’ that you’re looking for and Filters will bring up those and hide the rest. But in more modern versions of Excel, you can now also filter on number values (e.g., is greater than, top 10%, etc), and cell color.
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