Do some Excel Work

Excel the spreadsheet family of software. Spreadsheet software is used to store information in columns and rows which can then be organized and/or processed. Spreadsheets are designed to work well with numbers but often include text. Sometimes text in a spreadsheet is called a label, because it is labeling columns and rows of numbers. Numbers are called values sometimes, and can include numbers for counts or measurements, dates, times, and calculations from numbers. Spreadsheets can help organize information, like alphabetizing a list of names or other text or reordering records according to a numeric field. However, spreadsheets are more often used for calculating, such as totaling a column of numbers or generating a more sophisticated formula to calculate some statistical measure on a list of numbers. Spreadsheets and databases are in competition and have similar features. Yet the way they work in the background is different. When you work in a spreadsheet, you view the data you are entering as a section. In a database, you only see the data you are entering--you have to request a report or different display to see more of the information. Other differences are: (1) databases are more often used for applications with long textual entries, (2) very large applications (thousands of entries) are more often handled in databases; and (3) spreadsheets are easier to learn to use and get calculations from than a database program. This latter reason is why many researchers and students prefer spreadsheets for keeping track of their data over databases. It is impossible to give a complete listing of applications that can be done in spreadsheets, but they include budgeting displays, checkbook registers, enrollment records, inventories, coded surveys, field and laboratory research data, and financial and accounting applications. The capacities of Excel are as follows. You can have 256 columns of information. You can have up to 16,384 rows. That comes out to over 4,194,000,000 cells of information and that's only on the first sheet!!! You can have 16 sheets of information in one workbook, and the number of sheets can be increased, if needed. Excel refers to each file as a workbook, because there can be multiple sheets (pages) in one file.