Excel is used extensively in finance and accounting functions. In fact, many organizations run their entire budgeting, forecasting, and accounting functions entirely out of Excel spreadsheets. While Excel is defined as a “data” management tool, the data that is most commonly managed is financial.
Other common operations that Excel can be used for include: Graphing or charting data to assist users in identifying data trends. Formatting data to make important data easy to find and understand.
A frequent query we ran across in our research was “What is MS Excel used for?”.
Our answer is that mS Excel is a spreadsheet program where one can record data in the form of tables. This gives the user a more systematic display of data. What are the main features of Microsoft Excel?
You could be asking “Why do we call it Microsoft Excel?”
However, and now you must be thinking that’s why we have called it Microsoft Excel the program was developed by Microsoft. Microsoft Excel organizes data in rows and columns and these rows and columns intersect at a pace called a cell. And using these you can organize any kind of data.
What are the different types of data types in Excel?
Data types in Excel 1 Numeric data 2 Text data 3 Date and Time data (internally stored as numbers).
The text data is also called as string data. In an Excel Cell, text data is aligned to the left-side of the Cell and numeric data is aligned to the right-side of the Cell. Even if an Excel Cell contains numeric characters along with alphabet characters, Excel treats that data as text.
What is a data type in a cell?
The data type refers to the possible values which it can carry. For example : Numbers can only carry numeric value and not text. Similarly text will only content text and not numbers. Now in a particular cell, we can include both numbers and text as well as formulas .
What is date and time data type in Excel?
Excel stores internally the date and time value as a number known as date-time serial number. Date and time data is also aligned to the right-side similar to numeric data. Data and time data type can be used to store a date value, time value or both. The date and time value can appear of different formats, based on how you format the Cell.