From the course: Excel Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

What is Excel used for?

From the course: Excel Essential Training (Microsoft 365)

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What is Excel used for?

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- [Instructor] You may have asked this question yourself, you might have heard it from others. What is Excel all about? What is it used for? Excel is frequently described as a spreadsheet package and that it is, but it's a lot more. Maybe you've started a small home base business, you might be tracking sales and expenses, simple little formulas here to calculate profits, year to date profits. Maybe you work for a larger organization, you're involved in budget planning. This is much larger, it goes deeper than what we're seeing on the screen. A lot of formulas here, most of them straightforward. Excel has great display capabilities as well, we could be showing just the yellow columns as we start off our presentation. Maintaining a list in Excel, it's at the heart and soul of what many people do as they work with Excel. This could be a huge list, thousands of rows. And with lists like this, what do we want to do at times? Show just the people from one state, or sort it based on city, or street address, phone, zip, any of these columns. And maybe you've got list the tracks your inventory, or your transactions, hour by hour, minute by minute. Or you maintain an employee list like the one we're seeing here. This is using an Excel feature called a table, banded rows makes it easier to read. And here too, we could be using a filter to show, for example, just the people who are full-time, or we could sort the data to range it by salary, job rating perhaps. Easy to work with those data management tools in Excel. And when it comes time for presentation, let's just not use a bunch of numbers, let's create a chart. And you can create a chart like this in no time at all. This is called a column chart in Excel, but it's easy to change this into a bar chart or line chart, if you think that's more appropriate. And that's one of any number of different chart types in Excel. A colorful and easy to use feature that helps us present that big picture. And when it comes time to analyzing data, Excel's amazing pivot table tool, perhaps you've heard of it. We've got a list over in the left hand side here, it's about a thousand rows. But here too, we want to see the big picture, give us some summary information and that's what a pivot table really is all about, give us some summary without formulas. We don't need formulas as we create these, and here too, this is amazingly quick and fast to create lists like this. And Excel has some visual tools as well, there's one called Smart Art. We started an organization chart here. And off to the right are just a few of the many diagrams available by way of Smart Art, there are over 200 of them. And at other times we'll use some of those other visual features in Excel to create perhaps fancier titles like what we're seeing over on the left hand side. So just a quick look at some of the different examples we've seen here. We'll give you some thoughts, some ideas, on how we might use this powerful tool Excel.

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