Not Excellent.

[growler_south]

I'm thinking of doing a night school or home tutoring course in Excel. It seems most everyone I know understands what its for and uses it for all sorts of things, I'd like to know what all the fuss is about. Its that thing with all the boxes eh?

I know, its something I'm supposed to have learned as a baby, like my multiplication tables. Then again, I bet you dont know how an SU carburettor works.

Comments

[kiltbear.livejournal.com]

Well, unless you work with numbers, and that which goes along with them (adding them up, averaging them, making pretty pictures...er... I mean charts) then knowing about excel is probably not a top priority.

If you DO deal with numbers a lot, it can make your life easier.

Stick a number in each cell, top to bottom, and then at the bottom tell it to add (or average, or whatever stat function you want) and the result shows up in the bottom. Change a number in the list, the answer is automatically updated at the bottom.

Now you can point to that answer in yet another row of cells... and so on getting some sort of cascading effect... If you dont' need to do shit like that, well, what ever.

It is also a nice way to keep a list of things that need columns, and then be able to sort them by the columns...

There has got to be an "Excel for Dummies" book out there...

[furr-a-bruin.livejournal.com]

A lot of people MISuse Excel too; lots of people try to use it as a database, which it is NOT.

[sinnabor.livejournal.com]

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.

[andrewhime.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Excel is baffling unless you take a class or something. I just use it to lay out numbers and then do the math myself. It becomes a big dumb scratchpad.

[smellykaka.livejournal.com]

I'm thinking of doing a night school or home tutoring course in Excel. It seems most everyone I know understands what its for and uses it for all sorts of things, I'd like to know what all the fuss is about. Its that thing with all the boxes eh?

I don't have much use for Excel, but I volunteered for a "intermediate" level course in it at work nevertheless. Was actually quite interesting!

Then again, I bet you dont know how an SU carburettor works.

I know what one looks like, that's a start right? Was mildly surprised to see one under the bonnet of a Rover V8...

[boofbiker.livejournal.com]

Then again, I bet you dont know how an SU carburettor works.

Actually I do know how it works. You go to the Garage and you find the hottest guiy who works there and you say fix this. then after several hundred dollars later it is fixed. My question to you is, do you know how to pull a 9mm semi-automatic apart and put together. Scary enough I do. Boof with guns... that's just wrong on so many levels. LOLOL

[whiskerfish.livejournal.com]

Then again, I bet you dont know how an SU carburettor works.
I know you're not talking to me!