Everything You Ever Needed to Know About Spreadsheets but Were Too Afraid to Ask
Jordan Goldmeier · 2023
This chapter describes a wide variety of Excel spreadsheets. It focuses on the use of Excel 365 desktop for Windows. Excel 365 generally represents the latest versions of Excel, to which Microsoft pushes monthly updates. Excel has the ability to instantly provide summary statistics—such as average, sum, min,and max—in the status bar. Excel tables provide tons of features, akin to the data frames of Python and R that make doing data science in Excel that much easier. Tables have filtering and sorting already baked in. Excel's default formatting of tables is hideous. Structured references are the single most important feature of Excel tables. Lookup formulas are very important in data analysis. PivotTables help to group different elements of a dataset and applying some type of aggregation function like SUM, MIN, COUNT, and others. In the early years of Excel, array formulas required a multistep process to implement.