DEMO: Spreadsheets

One of the types of programs I love are spreadsheets. I'm a data person, so I love putting data into spreadsheets, doing calculations in spreadsheets. I love to organize data and then be able to create analysis of what's happening. And so I use spreadsheets for quite a bit of stuff. I even use it for a lot of checklists, so that way I can keep track of what I'm creating and how I'm creating, for instance, these videos.

Spreadsheets are really designed to be able to store data, to organize data, to compute things, and to analyze outcomes. And so we're going to take a look at each one of those when it comes to spreadsheets and how we utilize spreadsheets.

Excel and Google Sheets

Two programs that we're going to take a look at are Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. I'm just using the web version of Microsoft Excel, and I have additional features if I actually were to use the client, but this is going to give us a good perspective. Very similar to word processors, I find that Microsoft Excel has more features to it and I can do more things with it. I like Microsoft Excel more than I do Google Sheets. However, I actually use Google Sheets more often, because it's very easy and has online accessibility, and so I tend to use Google Sheets more often.

I'm going to actually pull up Microsoft Excel and look at some different ways that we can organize data within Microsoft Excel. My primary focus of this is not really going to be to compare and contrast Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets. It really is to go over the details of what a spreadsheet is.

Store, organize, compute, analyze

What I'm going to do to start this out is I'm going to go to the file menu and create a new one. And I'm going to do this Wedding invitations. So I'm going to open that up, and it's going to create a new document. This is called a template, so it's already formatted for us, and it's got some information already populated in it, so that way we can actually see what's happening here.

So what did I mention? I said that one of the things that spreadsheets do for us is it stores data. And as we can see, there's data that's stored in here. I can see people's names and their address and information on it. And this is just random information in here, so it's not actual people's names.

The next thing I can do with this is I can actually organize this data right here. What I have here is a list of how many people are attending in that party, and if I wanted to sort this and figure out who's bringing the most, I could actually sort it as well. So I'm going to go up to this and I'm going to sort in descending order, and I can see that Christy is bringing four in her party. So I can see how many people are actually going to be a part of this, and organize that data. So that was one of the things that spreadsheets do.

So I said storage, organization, and I said computation. If I scroll down, I can look down and see a total number who are attending. So I can see that all of these numbers added together is going to add up to 20. So there's a math component that's happening here.

And then it also helps us analyze data. Now that I've got this, imagine if this was scientific data. I'd be able to go in there and start analyzing this data to see what is it that it's actually trying to tell me. I could also create things like charts off of this and be able to analyze it through charts. So spreadsheets are a great way to organize and track information.

Tabs and a dynamic template

Let's look at a few more examples here. Next, what I'm going to do is pull up another template here. What would be a good one? Let's do, there's a group trans planning. Let's do this weekly task one.

So let's go and open up this, and with this weekly task one we have several tabs down here at the bottom. And so we can see a task list, and these are the tasks over here that I have. And I can populate this list and then it populates it on a schedule. And so if I delete one of these, notice here I've got worksheet 56 in here and that's one of the tasks on here, if I were to delete this, then we can see that it deletes it from the calendar. So there's a dynamic component here that's actually really easy to set up and create. And so the ones here have a few equations to it so that it's a little more complicated, but essentially it's pretty easy to do calculations and set these things up on a spreadsheet.

Cells, rows, columns and formulas

And let me just give you a simple example of that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go back to this book right here. What we see here across the top, these are what we call columns. And so we've got a column, and across here we have rows.

And so if I want to put in some data into it, let's do A1 here. This is what's called a cell. And maybe I'm going to have five in there, and I'll hit enter. And then in A2, maybe I have four in there. And now in A3, maybe I want to do some sort of calculation. Maybe I want to add these two numbers together. So I'm going to start out with an equal sign, and I'm going to start with the five, or I should say A1, plus A2. And I'm going to hit enter, and now we can see that it calculates it out. The total is nine right there.

And this is a dynamic number. So if I change this, 4 + 4 is 8. 3 + 4 is 7. 3 + 2 is five. So it dynamically changes. So I can put these calculations in here.

Or let's say I have a bunch of numbers here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to just create a bunch of numbers. And it doesn't really matter what these numbers are, but I've got these numbers, and let's say I want to add all of these together. I've got some negative numbers there. In fact, it's going to turn out to be a negative number. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to set up an equation here that adds all of these together. And I'll hit enter, and now I can see that these numbers all added together equals 130. Or perhaps I want to find an average of these. What I could do is I could go back and choose average and then hit enter, and the average here is -6.5. So it allows me to really quickly be able to analyze a bunch of this data to see what's going on with it.

How I use spreadsheets for my own work

Here's a little glimpse into how I use spreadsheets to organize my daily work. This right here is the videos that I'm creating for this course. And as you can see here, I've got the modules across here and the videos for each one of those modules. I've got the name that I'm going to call the file once it's created, as well as how far along the process I am with these. So what I'm doing is I create an outline, PowerPoint, filming, and then I cross this off or put an X in there once I've created it. So once I'm done filming this, I'll put an X in there. Then I'll do some editing with it, and I have the whole editing process mapped out here. So I'm able to track where I'm at in producing all of the videos that I'm producing for this. So this is just one example of how I use spreadsheets to organize my work.

I think understanding how to use spreadsheets, and having the skills to really be able to understand how to work with these spreadsheets, is a really important skill. I've used it a lot. So if it's something that is a weak area for you, that you don't really understand spreadsheets all that well, I do recommend taking a deeper dive.