Why Excel?:

During my senior fall, I was a part of the existentialism class where one of my main takeaways was that humans rarely get the opportunity to explore a new interest or passion because of society’s constant demands. 

Now that I was locked away at home with my twin-sister, mom, and 24 hour stress-cleaning dad, I wanted to discover something totally new to me, to learn Excel. For those of you who aren’t familiar with Excel, Excel is a spreadsheet program that allows you to store, organize and analyze information. Yes, I know some of you might be thinking, why would you spend six weeks on that, it seems boring… and to be honest I was fearful about that too, but in order to find out, I needed to try.

The only times I had been exposed to excel spreadsheets was occasionally overhearing my father rant about the innumerable hours wasted due to his lack of proficiency with the computer software and from my personal finance honors project with my advisor, Shafeiq. 

I knew that learning the essentials of excel with a business lens would be a beneficial life-long skill and a subject that I would rarely get the opportunity to explore in a serious depth.

 

ESSENTIAL QUESTION:

This leads me to my essential question which was:

“To what extent does the role of Excell play in businesses and how much more efficient does it make work for people who use it?”

 

What did I do (My Experience)?

To answer this question, I took an Macquarie University’s Essential Excel skills for Business class on Coursera. Coursera’s classes go as follows: you watch videos, take short quizzes, do a practice scenario, and at the end of the week take an assessment which is graded. Now you still might be thinking, how much can you really learn from a computer software like Excel. I too questioned how much one could really take away from learning about such a complex computer software in just six weeks. However, before even I noticed, I was done with the six week course in three weeks. So motivated to become a better Excel user then my dad, I completed the minimum required hours with ease and decided to take an intermediate Excel course. To give you a brief example, I learned how to calculate sales charts, timesheets for employees, professional charts and graphs, track expenses, and most importantly be comfortable with data. 

Now that I had an understanding of the essentials, I decided to learn how to build a solid layer of more advanced skills in hopes of being able to confidently manage large datasets and create meaningful reports. 

 

What I learned?:

Throughout my research, I found that excel plays a role in 70-80% of United States offices in some way, shape or form. In the second part of my essential question, I originally asked myself, “how much more efficient does Excel make work for people who use it?” implying that I would have to compare someone who uses excel in the workplace to someone who doesn’t. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to solve this question rather, “What is the difference between self-taught excel users and ones who learn on courses like these?” I compared myself to my dad, who’s self-taught so a lot of his skills were naturally developed, and was able to see many similarities, but there were many formulas and time-saving tools that my father didn’t know about. For example, I worked aside my father to show him the autofill feature, how to lock cells, create charts, and most importantly use time-saving functions.