Week 4: MS Excel
I would say that I know enough about Excel to call myself an expert, but also enough to say that I have a ways to go. Excel might be the most powerful program of the Microsoft Office Suit. Believe it or not, my expertise in Excel is not because of school, science, graphing, college, or anything else you would predict. My expertise comes from fantasy baseball. Over the years, my fantasy baseball league has developed into a very intense league, where we have to auction each player, budget money, and keep some players from year to year. In order to keep pace with the other league managers (all of which are my brother's friends from Dartmouth and outsmart me in every way - including 2 Jeopardy winners) I had to learn Excel's secrets. I learned conditional formatting, which is very useful during a draft to display which players have been taken already. I also used it to point out which players had good stats in different categories, and which categories I was weak in compared to other teams during the draft I also learned a lot about logic functions. I created many different formulas, often using the help feature of Microsoft. I learned the Rank, IF, COUNTIF, SUMIF, among many others.
Even though I feel very confident with Excel, I still would like to learn other features. I know that learning how to create Macros would be very helpful, along with Pivot Tables. Hopefully over one of the school breaks I will be able to explore these other tools.
I will have to share this post with my husband and oldest son who are both VERY into fantasy baseball and fantasy football. What a fun way to learn Excel.. and wow, 2 Jeopardy winners... impressive...
ReplyDeleteI've always wondered how fantasy baseball leagues worked, very interesting! I on the other hand don't feel that Iknow all the ins and outs of excel as well. I know the basic applications, but definitely don't use it to it's full potential. I found the crossword puzzle assignment to be very eye opening, I didn't know Excel was capable of doing that!
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