Throughout my educational career I have used Excel for many projects. So, when I saw that we had an Excel project I thought, "Oh that shouldn't be too bad. I know how to use Excel, it'll be a piece of cake." Boy was I wrong...
After watching the lectures for week 10/this project, I felt like I had been hiding under a rock. Why had I not been informed of all the magical tasks that Excel is capable of?! Also, how in the world did businesses manage/edit/track/format data before Excel?
This project entailed data from 500 subjects. The data pertained to their gender, sex and heart rate during a 15 minute workout and a 5 minute cool down. Specific functions in Excel enabled me to find the subject's maximum heart rate, a certain desired target heart rate, the highest heart rate achieved, IF the target was achieved, the percentage of each subject's increased heart rate from the start of the exercise program until the heart rate was reached, how many subjects reached their target heart rate during the 15 minute exercise window, and which demographic group got the most benefit from the exercise program.
Finding answers to all of the questions proposed by the owner of a fitness center required knowing specific formulas for Excel to compute, as well as formatting the data. I learned a plethora amount of skills from this project...skills that were necessary to complete this project. These skills included knowing and understanding the formulas for absolute and relative addressing, finding the average of a large amount of data, the =IF() function and simplifying data to its count rather than sum. I was most impressed with the fact that Excel was able to perform an equation with two numerical factors and present the product as text! (for ex: the "Yes" or "No" response relating to if the subject's heart rate was greater than or equal to his/her target heart rate.)
I am still amazed by the "intelligence" that Excel embodies in order to carry out such amazing tasks. In my opinion I feel as though I am pretty techno-savy and up to date with today's technology...but this project definitely made me feel like I was born yesterday.
After watching the lectures for week 10/this project, I felt like I had been hiding under a rock. Why had I not been informed of all the magical tasks that Excel is capable of?! Also, how in the world did businesses manage/edit/track/format data before Excel?
This project entailed data from 500 subjects. The data pertained to their gender, sex and heart rate during a 15 minute workout and a 5 minute cool down. Specific functions in Excel enabled me to find the subject's maximum heart rate, a certain desired target heart rate, the highest heart rate achieved, IF the target was achieved, the percentage of each subject's increased heart rate from the start of the exercise program until the heart rate was reached, how many subjects reached their target heart rate during the 15 minute exercise window, and which demographic group got the most benefit from the exercise program.
Finding answers to all of the questions proposed by the owner of a fitness center required knowing specific formulas for Excel to compute, as well as formatting the data. I learned a plethora amount of skills from this project...skills that were necessary to complete this project. These skills included knowing and understanding the formulas for absolute and relative addressing, finding the average of a large amount of data, the =IF() function and simplifying data to its count rather than sum. I was most impressed with the fact that Excel was able to perform an equation with two numerical factors and present the product as text! (for ex: the "Yes" or "No" response relating to if the subject's heart rate was greater than or equal to his/her target heart rate.)
I am still amazed by the "intelligence" that Excel embodies in order to carry out such amazing tasks. In my opinion I feel as though I am pretty techno-savy and up to date with today's technology...but this project definitely made me feel like I was born yesterday.
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