1.6 Use of Excel spreadsheets

Excel spreadsheets are used to manage, organise and present data in a systematic way. They are particularly useful when there is a specific relationship between results in different cells. They can be used in many ways in different fields; for example, in finance, they are mostly used to present and analyse data such as accounting transactions (e.g. sales, payments, cost, forecasting and budgeting). Spreadsheets are also used to design templates of financial statements and survey results.

Some other uses are listed below:

• In schools and universities, spreadsheets are often used to manage student data in areas such as their grade performance, attendance or personal biography.
• In hospitals, spreadsheets are used to manage patient data, like their personal information, details of their illness or details of the medicines they use.
• Data is often exported from more complicated computer systems, such as manufacturing, financial or marketing systems, to allow managers or analysts to manipulate the data once it has been created, and to carry out forecasts, simulations and ‘what-if’ exercises.

Excel also has many formatting options (borders, colour highlighting), to allow you to draw attention to aspects of your figures. One of the more advanced features is conditional formatting, in which Excel automatically assigns distinct colours to cells according to their value (e.g. red for negative, green for positive and appropriate shades in between).

In the next section, you will learn how to present and summarise a univariate dataset in a table and graphical form.