What is excel?
People ask me on a daily basis "what is excel?". This question can have a very basic and a very complicated answer all at once. Well let me try and explain to you what excel is.
Imagine yourself 50 years back, doing a stock count for your local big retail store. Firstly you would spend a week trying to find all the stock items to count and write them down on a paper. This would render about 1000 papers.
After getting all the items then you can start counting your stock. The problem with this is half of the items on your list is written so badly that you can hardly read them, the other half has so many duplicated in, that it takes you two days longer to count.
Eventually after 3 weeks you have the stock numbers. Now what? You take this back to the bookkeeper and they must now work another 3 weeks to reconcile the stock counts with their hand records. Can you see the problem here? It is impossible.
The fact of the matter is that 50 years back a big retail store could not be established. Handling big amounts of data was impossible. The amounts of paper to do this would eat away all the worlds' trees.
Eventually someone developed a computer and programs. Basic programs were then developed to input these large amounts of data and then be able to save it into a database and keep it there for future use. You can even amend these data and save a new version. Already with this weeks can saved by just being able to keep a record of your stock. If you get more stock, you just add it and save it. This is where excel started.
Later on people became smarter, they thought…Let us analyze our stock. Can we calculate the date of our stock, or the number of stock sold per month or even the gross profit on stock. This then started the next versions of excel. We could now analyze, by using excel.
The fact is that the more evolved our world becomes the more complicated excel becomes. We can now calculate statistical formulas, financial formulas and even engineering formulas. We can even make our file look like a programmed program without having programming experience.
Basically excel is a program that firstly summarized huge data and also analyze data better and more efficient than humans can do.
