Yea, Excel is just a grid of cells - each can be either a number or a formula that uses other cells.
If you need to do a lot of calculations, see the intermediate results, and play around with the numbers, it's handy. It's not hard to set up compound interest or mortgage sorts of things for experimentation. You can sum entire columns, do statistical things, graphs, etc.
Now, the sad truth of the matter is that like 80% of Excel users don't understand that it's a computation engine. They just use it as digital graph paper. Some will go as far as using a hand calculator to add the numbers before entering them into the cells. As long as they're happy paying Microsoft $100 to do this, we're happy to let them. The Office team has added features that make that sort of use easier.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-05-11 06:51 am (UTC)If you need to do a lot of calculations, see the intermediate results, and play around with the numbers, it's handy. It's not hard to set up compound interest or mortgage sorts of things for experimentation. You can sum entire columns, do statistical things, graphs, etc.
Now, the sad truth of the matter is that like 80% of Excel users don't understand that it's a computation engine. They just use it as digital graph paper. Some will go as far as using a hand calculator to add the numbers before entering them into the cells. As long as they're happy paying Microsoft $100 to do this, we're happy to let them. The Office team has added features that make that sort of use easier.