Excel - In the begining...
posted by Mark @ 12:52pm, Friday 5 June 2009.
This is the first of many (well at least more than one) articles I'll be writing on Microsoft Excel.
I use Excel as my example because it is the most well known and well used spreadsheet applications, however most of the articles should be relevant for other spreadsheet applications such as Open Office Calc too.
When to use Excel?
Firstly I wanted to cover when and why you would use Excel. The simple answer is when you would use a calculator for lots of different calculations, such as your personal accounts or small sales invoices.
In reality Excel is capable of alot more than basic additions, subtractions, multiplications and divisions. You can use it to make straight forward decisions based on criteria, for example if you run a club and wanted to give a prize to those with at least 80% attendance, you could use Excel to look at your register and indicate which members get a prise.
Many Businesses use Excel for reporting and analysis. This is handy because Excel will recalculate formulas as you type allowing you to see what will happen if you change a parameter, a recent example of this is the change in UK VAT, quickly changing this figure in excel would allow it to recalculate the VAT for your products.
When to NOT use Excel?
I have shown some ideas of when you might want to use Excel, but when would you be best not using Excel?
For when you need to perform a basic calculation dont use Excel, you wouldnt want to open a new spreadsheet everytime you wanted to see what the changes is from an Ice Cream or at the end of a meal.
Heavy statistical analysis is arguably not best suited for Excel. Its not that Excel should'nt be used for this, just that there are other tools that are designed specifically for this.
The same go's for accounting. Excel is very capable of producing accounting figures however there are accounting packages much better suited for the task overall, they only addition here being that Excel can be great for the bits that your accounting package may not cover.
Real World Example
Thats enough of an Introduction to Excel, except to wet your appitite with a nice real world example.
This example has formulae and information to calcualte deposits on houses and what your deposit will buy you.
House Deposit
More Examples and Contact
All my Excel tools and examples can be found in the Downloads area and are completely free, but please read the terms before use.
If you have any feedback or questions feel free to signup and leave a comment on this post, or as usual use the Contact area.
Comments
Submit Your Comment