So this week we learned about Excel. Whooo party! But actually it was pretty interesting. It has been a while since I have used Excel and it was nice to get to use it again and learn all the short cut keys and functions. Everything in this lecture I understood clearly except the Pivot Tables (Very Muddy to me!). I would like to spend a lot more time on those. Right now I am just using OpenOffice which makes it hard to follow along using the Pivot Tables. But I would really like to try working on it in actual Excel on one of the campus labs computers soon.
Before the lecture on data basics I had no idea that Excel used serial numbers which from start January 1st, 1900. It is very similar however to Unix Epoch (January 1st, 1970) which is what most computer programs use as a time starting point.
I really enjoyed the keyboard navigation tips. Such as CTRL + Home to jump back to the first column / row cell. You can also use the arrow keys to jump around easily too. I had completely forgotten about relative and absolute addressing. For absolute addressing you have to put a number sign ($) before the column number and letter. This will always use the information from that cell and not jump to using relative addressing.
I also enjoyed in the lecture how easy it is to use the Excel help index to find the names of functions. I had no idea what any of them were before watching. Some common functions are average, sum, min and max. I really like that you can use IF conditional statements which are used in programming. If I remember correctly the syntax for Excel IF statement is "cell number, condition, if true action, if false action"
Well that's it for week 5 :)
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