From the course: Excel 2013 Essential Training

What is Excel used for? - Microsoft Excel Tutorial

From the course: Excel 2013 Essential Training

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What is Excel used for?

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If you're just getting started with Excel, you've probably asked yourself the question, "What is Excel used for?" Excel is usually described as a " spreadsheet package" and that it certainly is. For example, what we're seeing on the screen here perhaps is the budget, the sales, expenses for small operation, and of course, we could easily expand this to a much larger operation with a lot more detail. This is covering data for a whole year, nice quarterly totals that could easily be expanded into a five- year budget projection model. Excel also can be used for handling database like information. Here's a list of our customers. We might want to sort this, we might want to do other things with it, it might have over a million rows even. We might keep track of our employees. Excel also has a table feature that facilitates treating this data as a unit, so that we can sort it and filter it quickly and easily. When it comes time to presenting information, Excel's charting capability allows us to quickly turn numbers like we're seeing here into attractive charts, like the one to the right. Excel has tons of analytical capability. It's got lots of formula capability, as well as over 400 built-in functions to ease your use of mathematical and statistical tools. It's got a great future called Pivot Table that allows us to quickly analyze information like this transactional data to the left, into a compact table on the right that quickly gives us the big picture. If that were not enough, Excel has a number of visual tools as well. For example, the title the way we're seeing on the screen, the organization chart to the right. There are over 200 built-in similar tools here like Venn Diagrams and others that quickly allow you to create presentation tools. When it comes to using Excel, there are just so many different ways you can use this package. It's just a giant grid of columns and rows and you can use it for a variety of applications.

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