Introduction
IN THIS INTRODUCTION
About Excel
In the late 1990s, I read a whitepaper—a market research report—that found that most Excel worksheets use no formulas. That is, most Excel users employ Excel more as a storehouse of data than as a tool for analysis.
That finding troubled me. Excel isn't designed as a means of storing or retrieving data. Yes, you can use Excel in that way and, according to the market research, many people do so.
That's not how Excel's developers intended it to be used. They meant us to use Excel to analyze data, not to manage it. If you used Excel, you were expected to use functions like AVERAGE(), RATE(), and PI(), not to just stuff letters and numbers into worksheet cells.
But it's ...
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