Why It Matters: Microsoft Excel, part 2

Why learn how to use Microsoft Excel?

In the last module, we focused on some basic functionality in Excel. But this program is capable of a lot more, including automatically organizing data (known as Sort), hiding data (Filter), and even more advanced functions that will automatically format cells visually if they meet certain conditions.

Before we move into the mechanics of each of these tools, let us consider for a moment the types of questions you may have when looking at data in an Excel worksheet.

  1. You want to see which month had your highest sales volume.
  2. You have a total clothing inventory but you want to know how many pants you have in stock.
  3. You want to know how many months from last year you were under budget.
  4. You want to see a graphic that represents your data instead of the actual numbers.

All of these questions can be answered with the valuable tools available in Excel and most importantly, without manually looking through all of your data!