The most prominent thought that has
occurred to me many times since starting my internship is the fact
that Microsoft Excel is a beautiful tool to work with. While far from
perfect, the number of amazing, clever, and plain useful features it
brings is astounding.
At its core Excel appears to be just a
sophisticated spreadsheet: a tool for putting data in nice little
rows for easy consulting with a lot of high-tech looking features
that are too complex for actual use. But after a little instruction,
the intricacies of Excel reduce labor and minimize pain.
Excel can do basic things like sum the
items in a column or multiply the values in a row but it has much
more power than this. In a table listing population of European
countries it can color code the largest and smallest, tell you the
average population, graph the distribution of population, and tell
you how many country names include the letter 'o'. With a table of
financial information it can tell you what attributes contribute the
most toward revenue, which factors are nearly irrelevant and how to
generate the most profit.
Excel is a wonderful tool to analyze
data though it does have its limits. For exceedingly large data
tables Excel begins to run very slowly. While its user-friendly
graphics tend to help with understanding they also require computer
resources based on the number of fields entered. But even with this
drawback Excel is a highly useful tool for basic analysis and it
erases much of the drudgery from data crunching.
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