Introduction to Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Package

Microsoft Excel, commonly known as MS Excel, is part of the infamous Microsoft Office suite. It is software which allows you to, among other things, enter data into an electronic spreadsheet, get totals, averages or use other functions on the data. Used by businesses, MS Excel is widely used for organizing data into charts or tables and entering data and calculating it, among other things. MS Excel has a wide range of fonts, tables, charts, and you can also have clip art on it, and the typical MS office options.

Microsoft Excel can be bought along with the rest of the MS Suite. There are various versions of it, but those most in use today are MS Excel 2003, 2007 and 2010, 2010 being the latest and most advanced version. MS Excel has managed to maintain its most basic look throughout most of the versions, but advanced options have been creeping in without causing confusion, and they are used by professionals.


Before MS Excel was popular as a spreadsheet program, software such as LOTUS 1-2-3 were competitive in the market. But now, Microsoft has become by far the most widely used program. In 1993, Microsoft almost completely swallowed up the market, surpassing LOTUS 1-2-3.


An MS Excel spreadsheet is like a very large table, and each field has a cell, inside which data is entered. Each cell has a unique number to it, made up of its row and column number, for example, if the row number is 3 and the column number is B, then the cell will be referred to as B3. There are also features such as data validation, and data verification. When entering large bulks of data, these options are often used to make sure that the same data is not unnecessarily entered more than it should be (data duplication) and to make sure that people do not enter the wrong data in the wrong cells.


Excel features include graphing tools and pivot tables. Each spreadsheet file is called a ‘Book\', but the file can be renamed. In a spreadsheet, many pages can be added, called ‘sheets\'. MS Excel files are known as XLSX files, or previously were XLS files.


Nowadays it is virtually impossible to work in an office environment and not have a solid grounding in the use of Microsoft Excel. It is quite easy to get started with the program, and you can find yourself building some quite complex data modeling in a short time.

Source:articlesbase




0 yorum:

Post a Comment