Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet tool that is part of the Microsoft Office suite of productivity applications.

It is widely used and offers a range of features for data organization, data analysis, and data visualization.

With Excel you can input, organize, analyze and store data, from simple lists or tables, to much more complex data in a structured way.

Excel is especially useful in performing financial tasks such as budgeting, expense tracking, cash flow analysis, as well as financial modeling.

Excel has powerful formulas that allow you to perform calculations, from simply totaling up a column, to performing more complex statistical analysis on the data you entered.

Some of the features that you can find in Excel include:

• From Excel 2007 worksheet can have over a million rows and up to 6,000 columns
• You can apply conditional formatting using criteria to make it easier to visualize your data
• The Solver add-in found in the Analysis group on the Data tab, can help you find solutions to complex problems
• Use the Goal Seek feature to workout the necessary input values to reach a goal by setting a target value.

The challenge sometimes is to remember what features, functions and formulas are available and how to use them.

In this series of articles, we explore some of the more common ones, and share tip on how to use them.

If you don’t have Excel, you can use the free version to follow along with our examples.

This free version does have limitations when compared to the full versions.