Excel Beginners

Navigating Excel: Step 1 To Mastering Spreadsheets

SPREADSHEET SOFTWARE AND WHAT IT’S GOOD FOR

What is Excel?

Excel at its base is a spreadsheet program build for productivity. From its inception the developers who created this world-renowned tool had a vision of simplifying how people worked. Prior to the existence of Excel there were solutions like Lotus 1-2-3 which ran on MS-DOS, but their primary goal was still the same, have a structured format to display and treat data. Even before the age of computers, spreadsheets existed in large ledgers with rows and columns meant to organise and track information in much a similar way as we do today.

Where Excel made its mark, and one reason why it still holds the position as the most widely used spreadsheet software on the market, is in the development and support of its functions and tools. In the early days of Excel, which saw its first commercial release under than name in 1985, it saw fierce competition and was an underdog on the market. By the year 1993 Microsoft’s Excel has overtaken many of its competitors and undergone 4 complete version changes, bringing in a flurry of new tools with each release. It created tools and functionalities which were not available on the market anywhere else, this includes their Visual Basics for Applications programming language, something which allowed for people and companies to automate some of their redundant workflows.

All spreadsheet programs share some things in common which form the basis for their use case. There are three main types of inputs which are critical to a functioning spreadsheet: There are text inputs, which can be referred to as ‘strings’ of characters. Numeric inputs, which are any number or date values that can be used in mathematic equations. Thirdly there are functions, which are tools that allow for complex tasks to be accomplished by simply typing in a shorthand of the function name and following the format directives. Using a combination of these three things can be described as creating formulas. Formulas are what a spreadsheet software understands as a request. These requests could be as simple as adding together 1+1 or as complex as performing the mathematics required for a scientific analysis.

With these basics in mind, let’s keep going through an exploration of the windows you can expect to see when launching Excel, and what tools are available to you through one of the most widely used spreadsheet applications in the world.