I have completed all the research regarding the importance of Microsoft Excel in the workplace, and my findings support my accusations. According to accountingtoday.com, Excel, nearly 30 years after it’s beginning, is still relevant in the workplace. It has kept up with the times by improving it’s data manipulation tools, visualizations, and versatility. Robert Half accounting firm also supports the ongoing importance of Excel in the workplace because of its simplicity of use, low cost, and practicality. The fact of the matter is that many of the day-to-day calculations businesses need to make do not need fancy, advanced software. Businesses have been using Excel for a couple decades now, and some things just don’t need to be changed.

Going forward in my Capstone Project, I need to create my presentation and gather my research into an essay. I have begun to share my project with my friends and other students in my classes. I have used my skills in excel to demonstrate to friends how to create personal budgets and track classes/ credit hours to stay on track for graduation. While these activities only brush the surface of the things Excel can do, it demonstrates it’s versatility and gets some young professionals exposed to things that Excel can do.

Sources:

https://www.accountingtoday.com/opinion/why-excel-is-still-relevant-in-2017

https://www.roberthalf.com/blog/salaries-and-skills/excel-for-finance-professionals-still-king-of-the-spreadsheets

While the regular SUM function adds up all the values in a given range, SUMIF restricts the values which you would like to sum in a given range. The Structure of a SUMIF is: =SUMIF (range, criteria, [sum_range]).

Where range is the column which has a restrictive quality, criteria is the condition for the data to follow, and sum_range is the range of values to sum IF it passes said condition.

The condition may use comparison operands (<, >, =,<> (not equals)) or strings of characters, both in quotations.

For example, consider the chart below:

To find the number of total pairs of shoes in the store we would simply use the SUM function over the entire “quantity” column. However to find the number of red pairs of shoes only, we would use SUMIF as shown below.