Charts charts charts! I loved working with the charts feature. My particular data set wasn’t that large, and in retrospect I think I would’ve chosen some thing that had a bit more data to go with it, but I have enough data at minimum to see the effectiveness of the features that we learned this week in Excel. Some stand-outs for me were conditional formatting, sorting, and charts.
I think conditional formatting is really when values in the spreadsheet that meet certain criteria can be manipulated color wise or presented in a way so that they stand out as special. For example, my spreadsheet included conditional formatting which highlighted and colored differently a specific drug reaction among patients that had a higher occurrence rate. Again, the possibilities are endless with regard to this feature, and the vast uses of this type of filter would probably be seen even more with very large data sets. The sorting feature follows along with its own unique utility, in that larger and smaller values, for instance, can be clustered together to see majorities or common occurrences, less common outcomes, etc….
I feel a bit sad that I never had the need in my life to make a basic chart in Excel. Lol. But I feel that if I did, I would be quite satisfied with what the program offered. The bar charts and pie charts are quite crisp and effective in their aesthetic, and the options are endless for the user I. Terms of chart type, color, directional variations, etc. I kept playing with the charts feature and finally had to move on because I was just playing with the styles too much. But this is where move of my data analysis lied. Using this feature allowed me to provide clear visuals in my proposal about drug reactions that were the most common among patients.
References
Wempen, F. (2016). Microsoft office 2016 at work for dummies (For dummies). Hoboken, New
Jersey: For Dummies. (2016).
