What is spreadsheet used for

Once this data is entered into the spreadsheet, you can use it to help organize and grow your business. A spreadsheet is an easy way to store all different kinds of data. These data types can include financial data, customer data and product data.

Businesses across the world use spreadsheets to keep track of their business accounts. You can enter formulas that will do all of your business calculations as you go without the expense of using accounting software.

Spreadsheets will do all the calculations for you, which saves you having to do those calculations manually. These programs allow users to work with data in a variety of ways to create budgets, forecasts, inventories, schedules, charts, graphs and many other data based worksheets. The true power of the spreadsheet is its ability to handle complex mathematical calculations and automatically recalculate totals as the underlying data in the sheet changes.

This is especially useful for "What-if" analysis and forecasting. Ranges can even span multiple row or multiple columns, and can be used in numerous formulas. You also can add up select numbers in a column, rather than a span of them, using the SUM formula. To do that, in the SUM formula you replace the colon with commas to separate the specific cells you want to total up.

Thus if you wanted to total up only the number of homicides in in which either poison cell B15 or narcotics cell B18 was involved, you would type this formula. This would mean adding cells B6 through F6. Now you can click the cells you want to be referenced, and they will be auto-populated into the formula. You can click-and-drag to specify a range, or click and hold down the shift key and click another cell.

To specify specific cells to add without making it a range, you should hold down the command key Mac or Control key PC and click all the cells you want.

In our spreadsheet on the types of weapons used in homicides, for example, what if we wanted to know the average number of firearm-related homicides each year between and cells B6 to F6. One advantage to Google spreadsheets is that it is designed to work with the Web. Specific functions allow you to load data dynamically directly from a website. CSV files comma separated values can be imported directly into a spreadsheet from anywhere on the Web. CSV is one of the most common data formats and can be found with a simple Google search.

For sample data, we will use a piece of crime data from UC Berkeley in hosted on Github. Click the small plus button at the bottom of our workbook document:. Many files will not be this clean and may require cleanup.

Governments regularly update CSV files on their servers. This may happen frequently with certain files such as election results. In the previous example, you might have noticed the date and time columns display these strange numbers which should be dates and times of each crime.

Raw cell data for a time value is the number of days since Jan 1, and may even be different when using Microsoft Excel. We can easily adjust this by changing the cell format. Tables can frequently be imported directly from a Web page into a spreadsheet. Note: This example will tie into the next section on charts, so we use it for convenience.

However, we do not advocate using data from Wikipedia in any production sense. Always vet and corroborate data directly from the source when used in journalism. The third parameter is which table element we should find, in case there are multiple. Live data from Google finance can be imported into your spreadsheet. The data updates automatically every time the spreadsheet is loaded.

Quotes can have up to a 20 minute delay, which is common for financial data. The initials at the beginning of the parentheses are stock ticker symbols. You can find the symbol for any stock at Google Finance.

The same function can be used to load historic data. With the spreadsheet on types of weapons used in homicides, for example, you could more easily see which weapons are most frequently used by ranking them from the highest number to the lowest number for any given year.

To do this, you first need to highlight the area of the spreadsheet that you want to sort. The highlighted area now includes the headings for the types of weapons used and then the numbers for each type of weapon for each year. You also can select whether to sort that data in ascending order A — Z so the smallest number appears at the top of the sorted data, or descending order Z — A so the largest number appears at the top.

A spreadsheet provides a lot of options for re-formatting the information being displayed. These are similar to the options in a word processing program like Microsoft Word or many other applications.

They include:. Some of these options are available by selecting Format in the menu at the top and then picking one of the choices in the drop-down menu. This tutorial was originally written by Paul Grabowicz for students in his Computer Assisted Reporting class, and later modified by Jeremy Rue for public use. I first learned how to use the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet program many years ago using that book, which took a step by step approach based on how a journalist uses a spreadsheet. I tried to use the same approach with this tutorial.

This content may not be republished in print or digital form without express written permission from Berkeley Advanced Media Institute. Form templates can be created to handle inventory, evaluations, performance reviews, quizzes, time sheets, patient information, and surveys.

Teachers can use spreadsheets to track students, calculate grades, and identify relevant data, such as high and low scores, missing tests, and students who are struggling. Managing a list in a spreadsheet is a great example of data that does not contain numbers, but still can be used in a spreadsheet.

Great examples of spreadsheet lists include telephone, to-do, and grocery lists. Spreadsheets can keep track of your favorite player stats or stats on the whole team. With the collected data, you can also find averages, high scores, and statistical data. Spreadsheets can even be used to create tournament brackets.

In a spreadsheet, data is entered in one or more cells. To enter data in a cell, follow the steps below. If you want to add additional data to a cell that already has data entered in it, follow the steps below. Although some uses above could be done in a word processor , spreadsheets have a considerable advantage over word processors when using numbers. It would be impossible to calculate multiple numbers in a word processor and have the value of the calculation immediately appear.

Spreadsheets are also more dynamic with the data and can hide, show, and sort information to make processing lots of information easier. An active worksheet is the worksheet that is currently open. For example, in the earlier Excel picture, the sheet tabs at the bottom show "Sheet1," "Sheet2," and "Sheet3," with Sheet1 being the active worksheet.

The active tab usually has a white background behind the tab name. In Google Sheets, your spreadsheets starts with one sheet Sheet1.