Excel Can Be Fun

“Excel can be fun” may sound like a nerdy thing to say, but once you start to get the hang of it, Excel can be a rather entertaining application, in addition to simply being a tool for enhancing your work routine. There's a kind of interactive, video game quality to the way Excel does its thing—enter a number in one cell, and watch another cell change, even if that cell is many rows away. Enter a value and watch the cell in which you've typed it automatically turn a different color (there's a reason for that, of course—to be discussed in Chapter 5). Change one of the bowling averages from Figure 1–4 and the chart will change—again, automatically. And it's all happening under your direction. (Unfortunately, the video game analogy doesn't go much farther than this, though—no machine guns, aliens, or Formula 1 racetracks here.)