From the course: Excel 2016 Essential Training

What is Excel used for?

From the course: Excel 2016 Essential Training

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What is Excel used for?

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- No matter how long you've been using Excel, no doubt, the question has occurred to you, "What is Excel all about?" "What's it used for?" Excel is frequently described as a spreadsheet package and that it is. But it's certainly that and a lot more as well. We're seeing a small worksheet here, maybe this is a small business just getting started. We're tracking sales and expenses. We might be dealing with a larger Budget Projection for a few years out. What's going to happen a few years from now, you're tracking Revenue, Cost of Goods, Expenses. It can be quite complex, much more involved. On the other hand, Excel is often used for maintaining large lists of data. This might be a list of our Customer database. Maybe, it's a few thousand rows here. We might keep track of our Employees. Maybe we've got another worksheet here that keeps track of Inventory. Any kind of list management you might want to do with this, for example, sort the data, filter it. Excel has a rich set of data management tools available to you. Sometimes you're viewing data that's just not effective until you've got a Chart. It's easy to create Charts in Excel as well. Here's a Column Chart describing the data to the left of it. Excel also has a great feature called a Pivot Table. We've got row after row of Transaction data on the left side of the screen here. Let's analyze it. A Pivot Table without formulas can quickly come up with some good solid analysis of what's going on. That's about a thousand rows of data there, here's the big picture. Also, built into Excel, a rich set of Functions. We see Financial Type Functions, Math & Trig Type Functions. More Functions for those involved in Statistical or Engineering environments. All kinds of capability here. And if that weren't enough, we've got some additional Formatting Tools as well using a feature here called SmartArt. We can do specialized titles like we're seeing above our data here. We got a built-in organization chart and some two hundred other visual tools just like that. Excel, in one sense, also is nothing other than a giant grid of columns and rows. But what you can do with it varies widely. And just a quick look at some of the different examples we've seen here gives you some thoughts, some ideas on how we might use this powerful tool.

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