Excel Project

I am fairly experienced with Excel, so thus I was looking forward to having an Excel project in my ISM 3004 class.  There were many tasks that we needed to perform for the Excel project that I was very familiar with such as, functions and basics like centering, bolding, adjusting column widths.  However, there were a couple of tasks, freeze panes and pivot tables, that we covered that I had never heard of in Excel, so it was interesting to learn how to use those features.

First, learning how to freeze a pane will prove to be very useful.  I used to find myself scrolling up and down to see what the headings were for the columns.  That task is now a thing of the past (thank goodness!).  I now know how to freeze panes!  Freezing a pane allows the information in the rows or columns to appear as you scroll up and down pages, no matter the length of the spreadsheet.

Second, I learned how to use a pivot table.  Using a pivot table is a very useful way to classify and organize data.  It was a little challenging to use at first, but by the end of the project I thought I had a pretty good handle on pivot tables.  A pivot table allows you to quickly view data at once and sort it multiple ways. For example you can choose how you want your ages to appear by choosing decades like the example shown below.  A pivot table also allows you to choose the fields you want to report instead of having information that you may not use on a report.

AvgIncrease Screen Capture

In all, I found the Excel project very useful.  It was a great refresher on how to use the basics of Excel as well as how to use functions in Excel.  However, I found learning how to use the freeze panes and pivot tables the most useful during the Excel project.