US WK 9 The Basic Applications of Microsoft Excel Discussion

Response 1: Hareesh Kumar Nadendla

Week 9 Discussion

COLLAPSE

Despite being available in the market for more than three decades, Microsoft Excel is one of the most popular and useful tools for data scientists and researchers as spreadsheet software. It is a very familiar name globally across all levels of the population using it daily. The most fundamental feature of this software product is usability (Sharda et al., 2020). Both business and personal individuals can benefit from these tools to use the capability to perform and process a huge number of records in the most user-friendly manner compared to the other competitors. Numerous add-ons are available to achieve diverse functionality like auto-fill, forecasting, lookup, statistical plugin, appearances, data visualization techniques such as producing various graphs and charts, just some to mention, which help summarize and produce versatile reports (Sharda et al., 2020).

By utilizing the simple calculation of variable input and output, Excel can create robust models to portray complex analytic tools to predict trends and upcoming data by simply adding them in the sheet and load. Customization is another user-friendly and widely used feature to save time, avoiding creating them from scratch using existing products available (Niazkar & Afzali, 2016). Excel enhances programming by supporting various languages and simplifies the macros by introducing increased efficiency, especially for complicated functions. Timesheet management and scheduling capability help employees to work more efficiently, minimizing the limit of human error. Various inbuilt problem-solving capability using various functions enables individual users to perform analysis in a very simple fashion (Niazkar & Afzali, 2016).

Excel may seem very simple, and even a layperson can use it, but it also can make complex operations simple with the functions. Without excel, work would have been far more time-consuming, and manual efforts would have been more, but excel has made the process simple (McCutchen et al., 2016). They can format anything in excel according to our needs, and that filters can be used, and logic can also be applied. Various huge calculations are made easy with the help of excel, and these are the reasons because which excel is so popular and as it has been in the industry for a long, information regarding the application is also easily available, which is not for the other competitors who make it convenient to use (McCutchen et al., 2016).

References

McCutchen, M., Itzhaky, S., & Jackson, D. (2016, October). Object spreadsheets: a new computational model for end-user development of data-centric web applications. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM International Symposium on New Ideas, New Paradigms, and Reflections on Programming and Software (pp. 112-127).

Niazkar, M., & Afzali, S. H. (2016). Streamline performance of Excel in stepwise implementation of numerical solutions. Computer Applications in Engineering Education, 24(4), 555-566.

Sharda, R., Delen, Dursun, and Turban, E. (2020). Analytics, Data Science, & Artificial Intelligence: Systems for Decision Support. 11th Edition. By PEARSON Education. Inc.