Excel Project

The Excel Project was to do a variety of analyses for a particular workout for our fitness center that we work at. The center’s owner collected data from 500 subjects. The data consisted of the subject’s starting heart rate. Their starting heart rate was measured each minute through a 15-minute workout, and continued to be measured each minute during a 5-minute cool down. We were provided with an Excel spreadsheet that contained the raw data for the 500 subjects, which included their age, sex, and 21 heart rate measurements, starting from time 0:00 to time 20:00. To accomplish these analyses, we are to work in the Excel program and complete different steps, where we will learn how to use tools within Excel.

Excel is tricky software to get the hang of. There are so many specific details that one must learn to be able to successfully use Excel. This project has taught me tools for my future career that is essential for the business world. Three tools in particular that I learned through this project were formulas, pivot tables and printing excel documents. 

Formulas are something that I never used before the Excel project. This tool is very useful for applying a mathematical equation to large amounts of data. Every formula must start with an = sign. After typing in your formula Excel using PEMDAS (please excuse my dear aunt sally) to solve the equation. One can also copy and paste this formula to different columns, same formula different data and answer. 

Another tool that I learned that will be very useful for my career is a pivot table. To create a pivot table one must click the pivot table and pivot chart wizard. To configure a pivot table, to give you a "count" of items instead of a sum, double click the field button on the Pivot Table, under Summarize By, select count, and then click OK. Also an important tool to learn working with Pivot Tables is setting the number format of data in a Pivot Table. To do this click a cell in the data area. On the PivotTable toolbar, click Field Settings. Click Number. In the Category list, click the format category you want. Select the options you want for the format, and then click OK twice. If the report has more than one data field, repeat these steps for each one. Below is the pivot table I created for the Excel Project, which shows the average of percent increase in heart rate for males and females of different ages.

Printing Excel documents may be common sense to some, but took me a few minutes to get the hang of every part of successfully printing the document. One lesson in particular that I learned with printing Excel documents were to automatically scale a printout to fit within a certain number of pages wide. I also learned how to print on the top of every page the display of the set of column headings. This is very handy for lengthy documents consisting of multiple pages.