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Microsoft Excel is almost certainly the most widely used spreadsheet application in the world. It is a standard part of all versions of Microsoft Office, and is currently in its tenth incarnation – known as Excel 2003.
It has a wealth of features, from simple time-savers that can be appreciated by all, to advanced functionality that would only ever be used by specialists in their field.
At its most basic level, Excel simply provides a structured way to store data. Lots of it. An Excel workbook is made up of worksheets, each of which contains an array of 256 columns and 65536 rows. That’s a total of over 16.7 million cells for your data. Multiply that by the maximum of 255 worksheets in a workbook, and now we’re talking about a maximum of over four and a quarter billion cells per file. And, of course, files can be linked together as necessary…
Size is therefore one of the big reasons for using an electronic spreadsheet programme such as Excel. (As a comparison, if a single Excel worksheet was transferred onto paper, and each row was a mere ¼“ tall, the sheet of paper would measure 455 yards, or the length of four football pitches!). With all this space at your disposal, it’s important that there are efficient ways for managing your data. To that end, Excel allows you to sort your data by as many columns as you need, provides shortcuts to allow you to move instantly to any cell, or to find any piece of data in any cell and gives not one but two methods of filtering your data.
The first of these – Autofilter – is a marvel of simplicity. Once Autofilter is turned on, simply select the value or item you’re looking for from a list, and Excel will instantly find anything that matches it (see Figure 1).
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Furthermore, you can ask Autofilter to look for ranges of data – such as sales between two particular dates, or valued above a certain amount. You can search for fields which are blank (perhaps customers with missing Account numbers) or not blank, which start or end with a certain character or group of characters, for the top 25% of sales staff or the bottom 2 items in a list.
Yet for all its functionality in this area, this is essentially databasing – a task for which Microsoft Access was specifically designed. Certainly, Excel does a pretty good job, but it’s not really its forte.
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