Microsoft Excel

Software Overview

Microsoft Excel is a widely-used spreadsheet program that is part of the Microsoft Office suite. It provides a powerful feature set for organizing, manipulating, and visualizing data.

Excel workbooks are divided by tabbed worksheets, each of which can be edited independently. Each worksheet contains a two-dimensional grid of cells, which can be formatted in various ways. Excel includes basic features, such as data sorting and simple formula creation, as well as advanced capabilities, such as pivot table reports and VBScript macro scripting. It also provides document security and password protection for data within a workbook. Newer versions of Excel save workbooks in the Office Open XML (OOXML) .XLSX format, while older versions use the proprietary .XLS format.

Excel has many tools that help quickly analyze data. From data import features to automatic sorting, filtering, and pivot tables, users can take large external data sets and gather analyses quickly. The extensive set of mathematical functions also gives the ability to manipulate data and compute results. Excel provides thousands of online templates available for download within the user interface. This gives users many different options for out-of-the-box styling, formatting, and mathematical computation, allowing them to focus on the data rather than extensive amounts of time on presentation. For example, financial templates can be downloaded by home or business users for tracking income, expenses, and transactions, as well as for automatically generating summary graphs.

The spreadsheet application also provides rich tools for visualizing data. Excel supports simple chart types such as bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, and scatter plots, as well as more complex ones for more in-depth analysis. These charts can be styled with a variety of visual options.

Microsoft Excel is a great program for your data management needs. Whether you are using it for personal, academic, or professional purposes, you will appreciate Excel’s ability to quickly organize and manipulate data to perform statistical analyses and create visualizations. These reasons among others are what make Excel an industry-standard application.

Primary File Type

.XLSXMicrosoft Excel Spreadsheet

Supported File Types

Additional Related File Types