What is Microsoft Excel?
Welcome to the world of Microsoft Excel!
Microsoft Excel is a software program for developing what is known as a spreadsheet. A spreadsheet is a place for storing data and to see how your data changes with any variation you make on other data in the spreadsheet or other spreadsheets linked to your data.
Data consists of numbers, text, symbols or a combination of all such characters.
An Excel spreadsheet is not unlike a database in that the letters for the columns of a spreadsheet can represent the fields of a database and the numbers for each row in the spreadsheet are like the record numbers of a database. And certainly you do use an Excel spreadsheet to store, organise and present data in many different ways so you can see hidden patterns in your data or to perform certain tasks in an easier way. The only subtle difference is how easy it is to move between records with the press of the Up and Down Arrow keys compared to a database (even in list mode), and how a lot of information can be shown in one spreadsheet. Although spreadsheets can be broken up into manageable parts and areas clearly defined for data entry (a feat more suited to a database), spreadsheets are renowned for their ability to show the fine details of what is happening in your data and generate quick graphs summarising your results.
Think of Microsoft Excel as like a 3D-modelling package in that data is used to model the real world in some way so that people can see what is happening when making subtle changes to the data. In 3D-modelling, people imitate the real world in a graphical manner by building 3D objects in virtual space and then specifying how the objects should behave in the real world based on certain well-defined formulas. In Microsoft Excel, modelling the real world is done through the use of numbers and how those numbers should appear are defined by formulas of their own.
