Whether you work in an accounting firm, a marketing firm, a car dealership, a school attendance office, the human resources department of a manufacturing plant, or an office associated with the government of the city, county, the state or federal government, you will most likely be called upon to use and learn Excel.
Almost every workplace has a demand for Excel, the most widely used software program in the computing world for comparative data analysis. Excel has been available in various incarnations for over a decade. Each subsequent version takes the show into new territory.
Popularly known as the best spreadsheet program on the market, Excel is powerful, easy to use, and remarkably efficient. Excel is highly interactive. Your spreadsheet cells are organized into a collection of rows and columns, each of which can contain a number, a text string, or a formula that performs a function, such as a calculation. It’s easy to copy and move cells, as well as modify formulas. The spreadsheet is displayed on the computer screen in a scrollable window that allows the document to be as deep or wide as required.
Working for a major newspaper in Northern California, I was one of several reporters involved in the annual assessment of our county’s economy. The job was to collect data that would be entered into Excel spreadsheets that ultimately categorized the information according to the category of statistics being reviewed.
The beauty of Excel, from the point of view of newspaper research projects, is that you can use formulas to recalculate results by changing any of the cells they use. With this model, you can use the same spreadsheet data to achieve various results simply by defining and changing formulas as you like. It is this feature that makes Excel so useful in so many different fields.
With the click of a mouse, reporters were able to get answers to a wide variety of questions. Which employers had the largest number of workers? Which had the highest annual gross income? Which seemed to be growing and which had declining sales? What was the volume of real estate loans and was there a decrease or increase from the previous year?
We look at local and national retail, services, financial institutions, government entities, agriculture, the wine industry, tourism and hospitality, manufacturing, residential and commercial real estate—everything imaginable.
Excel allowed us to examine ratios, percentages, and anything else we wanted to examine. Finally, we were able to use Excel to compare the results with data from previous years.
Since reporters are often former students of English, most of those who worked on this annual project were more familiar with Microsoft Word than with any other software program. Therefore, most were required to receive Excel training. For some, learning Excel was easier than for others. Some related to guides like Microsoft Excel Bible. Some reporters went through an Excel tutorial while others learned by doing.
The Excel spreadsheets were not only crucial to the investigation, but the format of each one was published in the newspaper. This is where some additional Excel features came into play. Publishers were able to make spreadsheets more visually appealing by using colors and shading, borders and lines, and other features that made spreadsheets easy for readers to decipher.
Wearing another of my many hats in the newsroom, I often wrote articles about the local job market. I found that proficiency in Excel was a requirement for a wide variety of jobs, and that area recruiting firms offered their clients opportunities to take free or low-cost Excel tutorials in preparation for the workplace. Most employers expect job candidates to already know the software the job will require and don’t want to have to train new hires.
Do not fool yourself. If you are looking for any type of office work, you will need to know not only Microsoft Word but also Excel.
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