Excel Project

In this project I learned how to effectively use the functions of the Microsoft Excel program. Not only did I gain knowledge, but I also got to apply the knowledge that I learned through an activity. In the project, students were told that we were to analyse a spreadsheet that contained data from a study about people's heart rate during exercise. The first couple of assignments were about basic Excel formatting, which included centering information, naming spreadsheets, and creating new columns. Then we were to manipulate rows and columns to figure additional information. An example would be that we had to create a new column that displayed a target heart rate percentage using formulas and the existing data. After that we used the printing functions to make the data easy to read when printed. Headers and footers that displayed titles, names, and page numbers were on every sheet. Also, the orientation was changed to landscape and all of the columns fit on one page. The first two rows of data contained column titles and were frozen so that they appeared at the top of every page. Finally,we made pivot tables like the one below to display a quick summary of the results of the data.

Avg Percent Increase in Heart Rate Pivot Table

I learned very much from this Excel project. Before, I didn't know much about of the non-basic functions on Excel. Through this project I learned how to use the formulas like IF, AVG, COUNT, and so on. These are very convenient if you know how to use them and now I feel they will help me in school and in the business environment after I graduate. Also, I didn't know the pivot table functions. It is so cool that Excel can do all that sorting and calculating so quickly and efficiently. One of the biggest helpful things that I learned are the printing options. There have been so many times where things you are trying to do just don't come out clean and crisp, portraying all of the work that you put in. But in Excel, you can get projects to turn out very nicely.

I really enjoyed learning this practical information.