Ch.5--"Excel and its function formula capabilities"

Excel gives an advantage to anyone who wants to use mathematical formulas. It has what it calls function formulas that can determine things like the max, min or average of a list of data. If there is a long list of data Excel is very useful because you don’t need to pull out a calculator and type in all of those numbers. In Excel all you do is click on the box you wish to perform a function on and then go to insert then function. Since there is such a huge library of functions Excel can perform you type in a description of the function you want and it searches in its library. Yet another advantage is it tells you how to enter the data in the formula to get what you want. Finding things like standard deviations, sums and averages can be long and hard work, but with Excel it is made easier and more efficient.

Ch.4--"Microsoft Excel in My Future"

In my future I am looking to be an accountant or a finance guy. Excel will help me enormously when I enter in things like projection sales, revenue and debts. With Excel’s capabilities I will be able to work faster and understand what is going on with these tables easier. My dad is a Vice President of Finance for a company and he says that he uses Excel all of the time. I have seen him, it is crazy how fast he can enter numbers and analyze the tables he creates. Excel’s calculator capabilities are very important when you need a lot of numbers multiplied or added together. I am excited to use the program in the future.

Ch.3--"Microsoft Excel 2008 for the Mac"

This article from http://www.macworld.com/article/131558/2008/01/excel2008.html is an article about the update to Microsoft Excel 2008. This website is about macs and it relates what is new to Microsoft Excel to those macs. Since Excel is macs leading spreadsheet provider they thought it would be useful to sort of list the pros, cons and buying advice of the new Excel, on their website. A new feature is the formula builder and it says that it is more time efficient. It has a formula AutoComplete so you know exactly what the formula is. With the toolbar icons being in color they are easier to read and to find when working on a spreadsheet. They say a disadvantage is that Excel 2008, just like Excel 2004, doesn’t support Services, so more work is required to use text from Excel in other programs. Their buying advice is: If you have used Excel 2004, you have used Excel 2008.

Ch.2--"Formatting Cells in Excel"

A new process that I learned in this chapter is the different kinds of cell formats. There are formats for currency to percentages. It is really cool. What you do is highlight the cell/cells that you wish to change its format and go to the format tab and choose cells. Go to the heading number. Read the descriptions for the format names to determine what kind of format you want for your project. For example if you change the format to currency Excel will automatically put a dollar sign in front of the number and it will place the decimal accordingly and put two zeros behind it, just like currency. It can also do fractions. It will display all the numbers you put into Excel as a fraction. This is important to Excel because it makes it easier and faster for someone to type in currencies, fractions, dates and more. It makes it so the person typing does not have to worry about putting a dollar sign or a decimal place into their numbers. You are able to select any number of cells you want for that format and you can have as many different formats as you want. This is good because Excel will allow you to have different formats for different cells.

Ch.1--"Initial Thoughts on Microsoft Excel"

I am very excited on starting with Microsoft Excel today. It is a program that has so many uses and I wish to know how those uses may help me in the future. I believe that having Microsoft Excel will enhance my ability to type numbers quickly and efficiently. This will be very helpful in college and in my career. My dad has been working with Microsoft Excel for many years and I have seen what he can do with it and I wish that soon I will be showing him some shortcuts and techniques in Excel, even though he has been using it for years.

Ch.8--"What is a Wizard?"

A wizard on any Microsoft program is a step-by-step instructor on how to do something like mail merge or creating a résumé. The instructor tells you what to do through a dialog box that appears when you click on the wizard. You are sometimes able to do these tasks without using the wizard, but there are a lot of downsides. For one, you may not even be doing something like a résumé right, but when you use the wizard you know you are doing it right because of the step-by-step instructions Microsoft Word gives you. Another downside to doing it yourself is that you are probably much slower because some things are very complex for a user to do by themselves. A wizard is very useful because there are not a lot of people fully understand all the tasks that a Microsoft program can do.