Excel-lency in Spreadsheets: 101

It took 30 years, but the day I've had to adapt and get my head around Microsoft Excel has finally arrived. Even before I moved in with a process engineer who derives a hefty income through his mastery of this particular program, I'd already begun to suspect that much of the world is run by the spreadsheet software known as Excel.

Until now, my exposure to Excel has been pretty minimal - I've never had to build anything more than the most basic of spreadsheet, nor have I been required to do much more than input data into sheets built by people much smarter and technologically more adept than me. I even survived my first semester at uni without Excel, or any of the other programs from the Microsoft Office suite for that matter, though with my enrolment into a statistics-based unit this semester, that time has come.

I'm still a mere novice, but this morning's lecture opened my eyes to just a few of the myriad capabilities built into this highly versatile software - namely Excel's usefulness in displaying statistics and building graphs - something I'm now able to do. Over the years I've consumed all sorts of information, presented in many different ways - I guess I never really concerned myself with just how those pretty graphs were mapped and displayed.

Hopefully today was just the first of many steps down the Excel rabbit-hole, as spreadsheet proficiency seems to me to be a very valuable skill in the modern, tech-centric world. As dreary a a prospect I'm sure it sounds to most, I'd actually quite like to learn more.

Oh, and fun fact - although Excel is software developed by Microsoft, the first version was only available on Macintosh computers. It wasn't until late 1987 - two full years after it's inception - that Excel was available on Windows.

That's what I learned today.