Throughout the coming semesters, I will be working 10-15 hours a week for Great American Insurance. My Goal is to not only complete the work for the company, but to also document my progress in the things I learn and to eventually share helpful tips and tools with other young professionals.

The majority of the work I complete for Great American is Excel based. Some of it involves more complicated tools and add-ons such as Microsoft Access Database, the use of Macros, and linking to external files. However, my goal in this project is not to document every detail of my work, or even explain the most impressive and complicated projects I work on. I really want to just document the basic Microsoft Excel tools that I find to be most commonly used, and the most helpful in hopes to aid other young professionals in their future internships and careers. Despite the vast use of Excel in workplaces around the country, I don’t think it receives enough attention. Excel provides tools at our fingertips that are easy to learn and use if only one takes the time to understand them.

Throughout the coming semesters I will document various Excel functions that I personally had to learn on the job, and post about them on this page. I will give a short description of the tool and an example of how it is used. I also plan to do a little research on the importance of Microsoft Excel in the workplace. Finding other sources to validate the value in learning these tools is one way to convince those reading my posts that it’s not just at Great American that these skills will be useful.

I hope to focus my project on 3 or 4 functions. This will allow for me to go more in depth, and keep the page simple to read and understand. I am looking forward to not only documenting my work and physically seeing my progress, but also hopefully inspiring others to learn these tools on their own to get ahead of the game a little bit.

By second semester (January) I hope to have the tools that I want to focus on chosen. I will then spend winter break and the start of the second semester creating examples and blog posts about these tools which should be simple enough for anyone to understand. Once I complete the “tutorial” posts, I will do another post with evidence on the importance of Excel in the workplace. I then will share my findings by sending my Capstone project link to STEM underclassmen and anyone else who may want to expand their data manipulation knowledge.