Discussion 2 comments

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Thread 1 - Use of Excel

You gave good examples of how you might use Excel. You mentioned sports statistics. You can get a baseball database for free at http://www.seanlahman.com/baseball-archive/statistics/. This information can be downloaded as an Access Database and then you can import some of the data into Excel if desired.

Excel is a good way to start solving a business problem. Once you understand the problem better, you may want to replace some of your Excel work with a commercial or open source software package.

For example, you can use Excel to track smaller projects but you may want to use Microsoft Project or a more sophisticated project management package to manage projects in the defense industry or those projects with large numbers of people working in multiple locations. Boeing would not have used Excel to manage the Dreamliner Project. However, I would bet that many managers in Boeing downloaded material from a project management database to perform their own analysis work for their area of the the larger project.

You might start managing a restaurant using Excel but you would probably use a commercial package to manage a chain of restaurants.

 

Thread 2 - This Course

Thanks for your comments on this course. Now that you know Excel, you may appreciate some of the "tricks" in making videos. Each video consists of about 5 scenes of 90 seconds to 3 minutes in length. In case a scene needs to be reshot, it is necessary to the Excel spreadsheet to whatever condition it was in at the beginning of the scene. I eventually learned to do a "file / save as" at the beginning of each scene in order to avoid manually backing out work before re-recording.