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The last major area in which Excel does indeed excel is in the creation of charts. Bar charts, pie charts, line charts, column charts, radar charts, surface charts, area charts…. The list goes on and on. Most of these also yield sub-types, allowing the user to modify the specifics of how the chart is put together. Colour schemes can be tailored to the company’s colour, the text can be modified to be in “house style”, company logos can be put in the background of a chart.
Many of the charts can be rendered in three dimensions, allowing for a variety of special effects, and they can all then be moved around the workbook, or indeed copied into Word documents or PowerPoint presentations.
Excel allows the user to add trend lines (calculated in any of 6 different ways), or error bars, representing that variability that exists in any survey or population sample. It allows for more than one set of data to be plotted – perhaps individual sales person’s figures against the totals for the company. Should this result in wildly differing figures, such as values of around 30000 for the individual as against 10,000,000 for the company, the two data sets can be plotted against different axes, allowing for less distortion in the appearance of the data (see Figure 4)
Figure 4 - Excel provides advanced charting capabilities
In short, Excel provides all the tools you could ever need for summarizing, charting and analyzing your data. It is more than capable of providing tools for storing data too, but where the needs for storage are extensive, a database is perhaps more appropriate, in which case Excel is perfectly able to extract the data as required, perform whatever analysis is necessary and then return the data to the database.
