Exploring the Possibilities of Excel

Up until my freshman year of college, the mere thought of using Excel terrified me. It was like another language, and I couldn't fathom even attempting to try and learn it. For my general chemistry lab least year, we were told on the first day that knowing how to navigate Excel would be incredibly useful, as we would be using it for data analysis in every lab we would do. Of course, I completely freaked out, and spent a good three hours in my friend's room having him instruct me on exactly how to do everything we needed to do. I still didn't really understand it, though, so any time we would have to do something new, off I'd run to have this new phenomenon explained to me. Learning, from the basics to the complex, the workings of Excel in this class has been incredibly helpful. I finally feel like I understand the language of Excel, and I know for a fact that I will be able to apply what I've learned to other parts of my life. I feel like the most valuable things I learned are how to use absolute and relative cell references, and being able to drag a formula down, so that you don't have to calculate it from scratch every time. In chemistry research, I have to make a lot of spreadsheets to analyze data and determine how well my reactions have gone. It's not difficult to do, but it's incredibly time-consuming if you have to fill in every cell separately, which I had to do before I knew about absolute and relative cell references. Now I can spend 20 or 30 minutes on a spreadsheet, whereas before I was spending hours on it. This is great, because I will be able to spend more time actually doing chemistry, and less time crunching numbers, which is great!