Technology & Engineering

What is Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a powerful spreadsheet program developed by Microsoft. It allows users to organize, analyze, and visualize data using features such as formulas, charts, and pivot tables. Excel is widely used in business, finance, and other fields for tasks like budgeting, data analysis, and creating reports.

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3 Key excerpts on "What is Microsoft Excel"

  • Book cover image for: Data Analysis for Physical Scientists
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    This is where the spreadsheet is able to assist. With a few key strokes, formulae can be entered into the spread- sheet to perform the conversions. A highly valued feature is the ability to link cells together dynamically. For example, where values have to be corrected, all calculations and graphs using those values are updated as soon as they are typed in and the Enter key pressed. This facility is powerful and allows us to investigate the consequences, for example, of omitting, adding or changing one or more values in a set of data. This is sometimes referred to as a ‘What if ’ calculation. 2.3 Introduction to Excel Designed originally with business users in mind, Excel has evolved since the late 1980s into a powerful spreadsheet package able to support users from science, mathematics, statistics, engineering and business disciplines. With regard to the analysis of experimental data, Excel possesses 100 or so built in statistical functions which will evaluate such things as the standard deviation, maximum, minimum and mean of values. More advanced analysis facilities are available such as linear and multiple regression, hypothesis testing, histogram plotting and random number generation. Graphing options include pie and bar graphs and, perhaps the most widely used graph in the physical sciences, the ‘x–y’ graph. At the time of writing, the latest version of Excel for PCs is Excel 2010. While Excel 2010 and its predecessors offer many shortcuts to setting up and using a spreadsheet, 4 they are not vital for solving data analysis problems and we will use them sparingly. We will describe briefly some of the features of Excel before moving on to use it. Excel 2010 commonly runs under Windows XP, Windows Vista or Windows 7 operating systems. The screen looks slightly different depending on the operating system, but the differences are minor and do not affect the functionality of Excel.
  • Book cover image for: Microsoft Office Suite & its Components
    ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Chapter 3 Microsoft Excel Microsoft Excel A typical blank Microsoft Excel 2010 spreadsheet running on Windows 7. Developer(s) Microsoft Stable release 2010 (14.0.4760.1000) / June 15, 2010 Operating system Microsoft Windows Type Spreadsheet ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ License Proprietary Microsoft Excel for Mac Microsoft Excel: Mac 2011 spreadsheet running on Mac OS X 10.5. Developer(s) Microsoft Stable release 2011 / October 26, 2010; 6 days ago ________________________ WORLD TECHNOLOGIES ________________________ Operating system Mac OS X Type Spreadsheet License Proprietary Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables and a macro programming language called Visual Basic for Applications. It has been a very widely applied spreadsheet for these platforms, especially since version 5 in 1993. Excel forms part of Microsoft Office. The current versions are 2010 for Windows and 2011 for Mac. Basic operation Microsoft Excel has the basic features of all spreadsheets, using a grid of cells arranged in numbered rows and letter-named columns to organize data manipulations like arithmetic operations. It has a battery of supplied functions to answer statistical, engineering and financial needs. In addition, it can display data as line graphs, histograms and charts, and with a very limited three-dimensional graphical display. It allows sectioning of data to view its dependencies on various factors from different perspectives (using pivot tables and the scenario manager ). And it has a programming aspect, Visual Basic for Applications , allowing the user to employ a wide variety of numerical methods, for example, for solving differential equations of mathematical physics, and then reporting the results back to the spreadsheet.
  • Book cover image for: Microsoft Word and Excel 2013/365
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    Cells are not intended for large amounts of text; you should ideally include one piece of data or information per cell. Spreadsheets are best for organizing data and calculating results. If you want the results to accompany text, you should produce your results in a spreadsheet and export the relevant data to a word processing document. There are an enormous number of applications for spreadsheets across disciplines such as accounting and mathematics. The coming chapters provide an introduction to spreadsheet software and its functionality, but the practical applications of this technology go far beyond the scope of this text. Some general uses that you may find for spreadsheet software are formatting information in large tables, creating charts to display a visualization of data, and performing complex mathematical calculations.
    The spreadsheet software application in Microsoft Office is called Excel. The first task you will complete using the spreadsheet software program is the creation of a personal budget. First, open the software and use the File menu to save your new open document as MyBudget. The native file type in Excel is Excel Workbook (.xlsx).
    7.2ANATOMY OF EXCEL
    Excel uses the ribbon interface with which you should now be familiar. Beneath the ribbon interface is the Formula Bar, which is used for naming cells and defining calculations. The main pane of the document window looks very different from the applications you have seen so far; it displays the rows, columns, and cells of the document. The bottom of the interface contains tabs for you to select the worksheet that is active in the document pane. Depending on the version of Excel you are using, the ribbons and shortcuts available will be slightly different. You can jump to the section that is relevant to you.
    7.2.1 Microsoft Excel 2013
    The interface for Excel 2013 has the same ribbon structure and general layout with which you should be familiar from the other Office applications. You can see an example of the interface for Excel 2013 in Figure 7.1
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