Computers occupy an important part in our lives , may it be personal or at work. Having been exposed to Computers since the Dos days , I have experienced the transition between command driven and GUI interface , the keyboard based Lotus 123 and the mousy Excel and the Black and white monitors to the colorful flat ones. What commenced as an electronic aid to us now would render us in a helpless position if the same stops working.
Review Objective
My objective in writing this article/review is to tantalize the average user and make him tweak excel and educate himself rather than give a free course in Excel. I admit I am among the many who do not know excel completely and its this grandeur that has made me write about this wonderful software.
MS Excel
Zooming into Excel , this application has paved the way for millions who play with financial data or data at large. Lotus 1-2-3 was the first spreadsheet software which was menu based and offered many features. The emergence of GUI and Windows rendered Lotus 1-2-3 largely redundant and Microsoft Excel became more popular showing how good Bill Gates is in Marketing his products.
Microsoft Excel is one of the most underused Software in the world , many who claim they “ know ” Excel very well , probably would know the same to an extent of 20 % or whereabouts.
Some useful features
Considering that the readers are reasonably well versed in Excel , here are a few features that I personally find very useful.
Autofilter
This helps managing huge financial data. The filter feature under the Data menu helps sum up the row and columns selected with a help of a drop down menu. This helps in zooming in to a particular cell(s) with the help of the selected rows and columns. For eg – if you have a data with client name amount etc etc and you wanna find out the amount you billed to Mouthshut.com Ltd , the filter helps you zoom into the client name in that particular column. Not restricting this feature to this alone, once you find a particular data the custom field allows you to tweak it till you get your desired information. Very useful for Financial guys.
Pivot Table
This is a very intriguing feature of Excel akin to the Egyptian mummies , Though I know a little about this feature my endeavor in using and learning this more has not stopped. This feature literally helps you play with you data , arranging them in various permutations and combinations that help you analyse the same better.
Auditing
Let the name not scare you , Angel009 I am sorry if I hurt you but after being one earlier auditors are always the scary guys. This function helps you track the flow of data when you are having multiple sheets with figures flowing in from one sheet to another.
Cell Linking
The most simplest use of Excel and the important one too. I have made and entire Financials till balance sheet with this feature when I was in my consulting stint. It helps link cells from one sheet/file to another making the figures very dynamic. One change here and I can know the impact in the final statement.
Visual Basic add ons and Functions
By Functions I mean the Formulae functions. The huge list of formulae let you do advanced analysis like IRR and the like. My favorite here is the simple If , Then and the Sum if , this ahs helped me in arranging my data in a better format. For more on these look at excel dudes as it would take me long in explaining the same.
The visual basic add ons literally transform the look and feel of excel and make a virtual system for the user. This one too is an ocean and one needs to know Visual basic well to operate the same.
Well I know this review is incomplete and its meant to be that way , it supposed to give an insight into Excel to make sure that this application is used more and ... more importantly Respected for its features.