Week 5: Clear

Week five covered the topic of mastering Excel. The clearest topic to me in week five was the formulas. They were extremely easy to catch onto as long as you didn't forget to put the equal sign ( = ) at the beginning of your formula. Formulas can be built by clicking on a cell and typing in the correct combination of letters, numbers, and symbols to produce a answer. This may seem a little intimidating at first, but the formulas are all basic math followed by the order of operations that you learn in elementary school (PEMDAS). The lectures were extremely helpful in demonstrating how to enter and copy your formulas into other cells. However, it was also helpful to me to explore the formula help bar to identify the correct formulas I needed to use and what they are used for. 


Mastering the use of formulas in excel can be very beneficial later on in life when you are looking for a job or just managing your money and time. Many work places have strict rules about using Excel for certain projects and having well rounded knowledge of the program ahead of time can give you a leg up on the competition in the job market. Also, I have talked to many college professors and they said that submitting your resume in Excel really shows how important the job is to you and sets you apart from the other thousands of applications that are submitted in Word format. 


For the more experienced Excel user there are formulas that can help you form advanced mathematical calculations quickly and accurately. Also, when working with Excel formulas you need to keep in mind the difference between absolute cell addressing and relative cell addressing. An absolute cell address consist of the column letter and row number surrounded by dollar signs ( $ ) and is used when you want a cell address to stay in a specific cell. While a relative cell address point to a different cell in relation to how far the cells are apart. Relative cells addresses change and absolute cell addresses do not. 


The following link helped me to remember the format when differentiating relative and absolute cells. It also helped me recognize formula formats for basic math. 


http://www.baycongroup.com/excel2007/02_excel.htm

Excel Project

For the Excel project that I had to complete three worksheets. I had over 500 pieces of data to work with and it got a little confusing at times. During the project I was required to adjust pre-existing formats such as changing the text position, making it bold, italic, changing the size, and changing the font. I had to create new columns and sheets and rename them as they are made. One of the simplest part of the projects was creating the formulas. I was required to create simple formulas for adding and subtracting, and also some formulas for calculating percentages. After watching the short videos and with my past excel experience the formulas were extremely easy to configure and place. 

The hardest part of the assigned project was learning how to make a pivot table. I spent hours watching videos, using google to search "pivot tables" online and reading through the chapters in the book. It was especially hard to figure out to me because I am new to Mac Office and all my previous experience is in regular Microsoft excel. Not to mention the fact that the lectures are all in Microsoft excel so they were of almost no help. Finally, it came to me and I realized what I was doing wrong by trying to adjust my columns in rows to much instead of just entering the data. After completing the first pivot table, creating the second pivot table was a breeze and only took me minutes to complete.The information once you learn it is extremely easy to catch onto.

I feel that learning both Microsoft excel and Mac's version of excel will be greatly beneficial in the future. I will not have to learn a new system now and will be able to transfer smoothly to whichever program my place of business prefers. Below I have provided a screen shot of my AvgIncrease pivot table. Learning to take screen shots on the Mac was also something new I learned from completing this project. I am really happy I jumped on this project far ahead of its due date because it definitely threw me through some loops.