Putting Data Management into Context

   

Excel is a superb application. Its user interface is comfortable and effective at least, you can make it match your own sense of comfort and effectiveness. The worksheet layout is flexible. You can make the rows and columns stand for whatever you want: records and variables, weeks and days, accounts and debits or credits, and so on.

Excel offers a huge selection of functions: prefabricated formulas that have already done the heavy lifting for you. Its charts help you visualize what's going on with your data. Its pivot tables make it a snap to synthesize and analyze large collections of records. You can even control its appearance so that other users can't tell that what they're looking at is an Excel worksheet.

And Excel offers you plenty of ways to manage and manipulate data. You can filter data to focus in on details, sort data into subsets, and make use of various lookup and reference functions that make Excel act something like a true database management system.

Over the years, Excel has been so successful that many people never want to use anything else. In many cases, they don't have to. For small-to-medium data sets, Excel gives you most everything you need to manage and analyze data. It's when the data sets get large that things start to get out of hand.

Beginning with Chapter 2, "Excel's Data Management Features," Managing Data with Excel shows you how to use different Excel features in particular, its worksheet functions to make Excel act like a database management system. Parts III, "Managing External Data from Inside Excel," and IV, "Managing Databases from Inside Excel," show you how to deal with situations that involve more data than Excel can handle effectively by itself.

This chapter is meant to convince you that there comes a point when more data becomes too much of a good thing. When you recognize that one of your own projects has reached that point, you'll be well placed to apply one or more of the data management solutions you'll read about in this book.



Managing Data with Microsoft Excel
Managing Data with Microsoft Excel
ISBN: 789731002
EAN: N/A
Year: 2003
Pages: 134

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