Week 5: Muddy

This week's lesson was all about Excel. To begin, I would like to say that my personal journey with Excel has not been a easy one. My journey begins in high school when I first learned the basics of Excel in my computer class.

My computer teacher did not spend much time on Excel and sped up the process. Because of this, I never learned the basics of Excel. I then built up an aggression towards it and always set myself up for failure. However, I am more willing now to catch up on what I missed in high school and become an Excel pro.

In doing research for this blog, I found that excel really isn't as "muddy" as I thought it was. Commonly known, Excel is a spreadsheet application written and distributed by Microsoft. The application features calculation, graphing tools and pivot tables. 

I also researched and found that there are several tutorials out there for individuals like me who need Microsoft Excel tutorials. This link provides you with the basics to get started with Excel. Excel Tutorial.

The muddiest past of Excel for me was the differentiating between relative and absolute cell references.

Relative cell reference is the most widely used type of cell reference in formulas.  Relative cell references are basic cell references that adjust and change when copied or when using AutoFill.

Example:

=SUM(B5:B8), as shown below, changes to =SUM(C5:C8) when copied across to the next cell.

  

Situations arise in which the cell reference must remain the same when copied or when using AutoFill. This is when absolute cell reference comes into play. Dollar signs are used to hold a column and/or row reference constant. 

 

Example:

In the example below, when calculating commissions for sales staff, you would not want cell B10 to change when copying the formula down.  You want both the column and the row to remain the same to refer to that exact cell.  By using $B$10 in the formula, neither changes when copied.

After researching these concepts more in depth they slowly but surely became more clear for me.

(Examples taken from this link)