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

[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.