Excel Project

Over the last couple of days I have been working on the Excel Project for my business computing class.  This project gave me a great opportunity to polish a few old skills and learn a few new ones.  The assignment was to take a large sample of raw data that was taken from 500 people exercising in a gym and manipulate it according the gym owner's requirements.  Their heart rates were measured once every minute while working out and once every minute after the workout.  The gym owner's instructions included me formatting the raw data by adding new columns and formulas as well as using the pivot table function to analyze the data. 

I use Excel 2003 at work almost daily and have become very accustomed to using that version so it took me a few minutes to locate certain things such as the freezing of the first two rows so they will be displayed as the user scrolls down the spreadsheet.  However, the inserting of new columns and the resizing of columns was nothing new.  Another thing that was different in Excel 2007 was the formatting of the print preview screen.  It seems as though I have a lot more capabilities of formatting how the page is printed though.   

In several of the new columns that I inserted I had to write a formula to calculate certain results such as their target heart rate, whether or not that was acheived, and the percentage increase from the start of the exercise to their highest recorded heart rate.  Since I work with Excel quite frequently I found most of these to be fairly simple.  However, I did not know that there was a MAX function.  I think this function will be useful in my professional career as I plan to apply it the next time I have a similar goal at work.

Before this project I had never worked with pivot tables.  When analyzing large samples of data in the past I always found it to be very time consuming and more trouble than it was worth.  But with pivot tables you can analyze a large spreadsheet of data in a matter of seconds.  I am looking forward to applying this to my work in the near future.  Below is a screenshot of the pivot table I made to find the average percentage increase in heart rate for males and females of certain age groups.

Overall, I found this project to be challenging and rewarding.  I hope that I can put to good use some of the new features I've learned such as pivot tables and some of the print options I've learned as well.  I really enjoy working with Excel and am looking forward to learning some more of the advance features.