Microsoft Excel is an excellent tool to utilize in school, home offices, and work. The Excel Hunt that we performed brought back many of the skills that I learned during a course that was taken awhile back. This is definitely something that should be practiced and refreshed regularly in order to use this service to the greatest extent. All of this information aided in the completion of our Excel Project in which we were to organize data on heart rates during exercise intervals and with that information acquire additional data as to which gender and age bracket of participants were able to achieve their target heart rates.
With even the basic knowledge of excel, the workbook structure, data basics, and printing are easily followed and transferable to many of the other Microsoft Office programs. This would include turning the page to have it view as landscape, ordering certain pages to be printed, navigating the worksheet, and other such information. The other information, such as creating formulas, absolute vs. relative cell addressing, functions, and pivot tables were all in desperate need of refreshing. Without constantly using this program, you will negate the positive effects of such programs. For example: when creating a function; as long as you know what you are asking for, and can put that into mathematical terms, the computer program will do the job for you, such as finding the average of a group of cells, or the greatest or least value in a large group of cells.
One of the functions on Excel that I learned during this project was the pivot table. I had no experience with this function prior to the Excel Hunt and Excel Project. PCA explains that the “Pivot tables summarize data into rows and columns of summed up (aggregated) data. Excel spreadsheets are most often designed as flat, one-dimensional tables, consisting of data elements organized under column headers. This often makes it difficult to get summarized information, particularly when data needs to be grouped and sub-totaled into any number of categories or dimensions. Pivot tables overcome this obstacle by quickly aggregating (grouping) and summarizing large amounts of flat data, giving it depth and the desired aggregate values.”The process for creating the Pivot Tables in the Excel Project took a bit of time. After understand exactly what I was supposed to be looking for and how you enter data into the tables, it became fairly easy to use. On top of that, the pivot tables allows you to break down a large amount of data into easily readable and understandable charts or tables with a lot less information in front of you to have to wade through.
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