Personal experience with Microsoft Excel Randall W. Broyles Trident University International
From being designed primarily for personal productivity, Microsoft Excel is inherently a personal productivity database meant for individual and the small business. While enterprise database management applications and platforms are meant for much greater and wide-spread use across organizations. Microsoft Excel has progressed from a relative simple calculation program to a more advanced database application through the use of Microsoft Visual Basic and other programming languages that have been integrated into the baseline application. Microsoft Excel has many wonderful features to offer the small business and personal user. Excel is the most widely known for its spreadsheet function, though it has numerous other uses. Spreadsheets are useful to any type of circumstances. For example, a spreadsheet can be used as a personal checkbook, or a professor’s grade book. Invoices and budgets can be prepared with Excel as well. Excel is extremely useful in the decision making process and the Goal Seek command can even be used to return specific results that you are looking for. Another popular function of Excel is the ability to prepare and maintain to produce results that meet a specific criteria. For instance, a certain stock broker might use these commands to return a list of customers who have sold certain stocks over the past two years or more. Lists created in Excel can be converted to pivot tables and pivot charts to summarize the data. The ability to use functions and formulas to perform calculations and the ability to copy those functions and formulas throughout the workbook keeps us from having to do repetitive manual calculations. The calculation capabilities have led many financial professionals specifically to use Microsoft Excel for generating of