The Excellence of Excel!

Well, I must admit that I never would've agreed with my blog title a month or two ago- in fact, the thought of using excel terrified me! I greatly underestimated it's potential, and never realized just how many useful tools it offered for so many varied tasks. What I have learned through completing this course will carry me well through the rest of my college career and life in general.

In Biology Laboratory, we're required to construct graphs using Excel based on our weekly experimental results. The first few graph-constructing weeks were miserable for me, as I'd never dreamed that such a daunting task was possible on excel and didn't even know where to begin! I had no clue what I was doing and probably spent hours trying to figure out a simple process that should've taken 5 minutes! Then CSCI came to the rescue and I realized how simple and comprehensive Excel graph-making could be. I have learned some really invaluable things that will undoubtedly be of great help to me in the future for my science major.

I also found creating budgets interesting, and learning all the different functions and formulae involved was so helpful too. I used to think that all the data in each individual cell had to be entered separately- no wonder I thought it was such a tedious and intimidating program! Now I'm able to keep track of my monetary budgets more easily in the future and collaborate data more efficiently and quickly. I especially found the "if" function and the absolute cell references useful to have in hand.

As many of my classes have presentations as part of the syllabus, I'm so grateful to have learned about the "link" feature between excel documents and powerpoint slides. I was dumbfounded we I realized that this was possible and will definitely be making use of this very often.

I would recommend the course we took on Excel to any freshman student, as I really found the information we covered so useful and surprisingly interesting! I also couldn't believe just how many features Excel has- there are unlimited possibilities for creating almost anything you desire with data. Making a graph, calendar, table or pie-chart doesn't have to be so boring and tedious anymore! It is also very user-friendly and has great trouble-shooting options and online tutorials. So if you cringe just at hearing the word "Excel," I challenge you to leap out of your comfort zone and discover this great program. I did and it has certainly been one of the most beneficial and rewarding things I could have done!