Approximately a year later, and I have learned so much about Microsoft Excel, it’s advanced data manipulation tools, and it’s importance in the modern workplace. Excel is a tool that is often overlooked and overshadowed. My goal in this project was to share the skills I learned through my work with Great American Insurance with other young professionals and to justify the significance of learning these skills through research. I have completed all of my goals and consider this project a success.

Research published in Information Systems Education Journal, accounting.com and several other sources support my hypothesis that Excel is absolutely still necessary for everyday functions of businesses, despite it’s age. Excel is able to keep up with it’s younger, more complex competitors because of its legacy, simplicity, flexibility, and continuous updates.

This research gave me the justification I wanted in order to to push my fellow young professionals to take time to practice some simple, yet advanced data manipulation functions in Excel. I shared my Capstone project (this blog) with my classmates, particularly those in the Data Analytics Major like myself. This blog has already been proven to be helpful. One friend actually told me she used my posts to help her in her own job; my sister, who is out of college, is going to begin taking an online Excel class; I, myself now have a resource to see a few of the skills I’ve mastered over the past 9 month.

In conclusion, I am thankful my work with Great American Insurance presented me with projects which pushed me to learn data manipulation in Excel on my own. Because of my surprise in how much Excel can do, I documented some of the most helpful functions, and shared them with other students in the hope to aid them in their professional endeavors.

SUMIFS is a very basic and useful function in Excel that is just one step above a SUMIF. If you are not familiar with the SUMIF function, read about it here first.

SUMIFS is basically the same idea of SUMIF except you can have several criteria, or if statements, you want your data to follow.

Here is the structure of a SUMIFS: =SUMIFS (sum_range, range1, criteria1, [range2], [criteria2], …)

In words, the only values in sum_range which will be summed are those in which range1 passes critera1 AND range2 passes critera2 AND…

For Example: Imagine you are trying to find the number of shoes which are in a particular price range and are a certain color. Suppose you have the following data. To find the quantity of shoes which follow your attributes, you would use a SUMIFS similar to the one below.

There are 8 pairs of shoes which cost less than $40 and are Red.

SUMIFS are quite simple with a little practice and are very useful in larger data problems.