What is MS Excel?

MS Excel is a popular program for creating sophisticated spreadsheets.

MS Excel is a powerful Microsoft computer program used for creating spreadsheets. Though such a description makes Excel sound relatively simple, this is not so. It has the ability to perform complex operations, save time and improve efficiency dramatically in the process. Whether being utilized at home or in the workplace, MS Excel can be an invaluable program when it comes to many analytical tasks.

Basics

Excel is fundamentally a spreadsheet program, featuring cells, rows and columns for labeling and organizing data. Columns and rows meet to form many individual cells, each one generally representing one data point or piece of information. After developing a spreadsheet, you can perform many manipulations of the data.

Analysis of Data

Upon entry of the data into a spreadsheet, you can perform many kinds of analysis, from mathematical operations to automated graph creation. Though learning to operate Excel can undoubtedly be challenging at times, once you learn how to operate it correctly, the program's capabilities make many tasks far more simple.

Operations

One excellent use of Excel is its ability to carry out formulas (aka functions). For instance, if you'd like to use Excel to track expenses, you can perform a SUM operation to tally expenses in different categories of a budget.

If more complex operations are required—such as numerical data analysis—you can create a graph and Excel will perform a regression analysis on the data, finding the best equation. For anyone who has struggled to find an equation, MS Excel can help.

Interface

For those who initially find MS Excel overwhelming, its familiar interface is quite a relief. Much like the popular program MS Word, it features several menu headings in the upper left corner of the screen, including "Home," "Insert," "Page Layout," "Formulas," "Data," "Review" and "View." Though the interface is a bit different in each version of the program, these items are generally quite consistent.

Misconceptions

For those unfamiliar with Excel, it can seem rather complicated to use. Moreover, the fact that it is often discussed with regard to numbers in business, science and mathematics can bring back unfortunate memories of bad experiences for those who did not enjoy these subjects during school.

For those reasons and the fact that many people do not find Excel to be particularly intuitive, new users may be dissuaded from learning the program. However, spending the time becoming acquainted with Excel (Microsoft's "Help" for Excel is a good resource) can be a worthy investment, because the program can boost productivity by saving time and simplifying tasks.

References

• Microsoft: Microsoft Excel 2010