From the course: Microsoft Data: SharePoint, Power Platform, Access, Excel

Performing calculations

From the course: Microsoft Data: SharePoint, Power Platform, Access, Excel

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Performing calculations

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- [Instructor] In Microsoft Office Tools, there are a lot of different ways to display information in a table format. A lot of the decision about which tool might be better to use depends on the final purpose of the information, is it to be printed or just shared online or used as a part of a different document? However, part of the decision revolves around whether or not you need to perform calculations as part of the table. Excel is hands down the easiest of the Office tools to do calculations in, the worksheet format is at its strongest when used to work with formulas, especially numeric. Excel has a ton of built in tools to help you with formulas too. Just click formulas in the menu bar and then select one of the many different formula types to see all of the different possible functions. These will prompt for the formula's parameters and take you to further documentation if you need more help, you can also just start typing in the formula bar itself. And Excel will give you prompts there. Now of course, it takes time to learn all of the possibilities because there are so many, but once you have formulas under your belt, the power is awesome. But did you know that both Word and PowerPoint have table tools also? You don't get the same kind of helpful prompts in Word, but getting totals for columns or rows is easy. You can also use other functions such as average or count. PowerPoint does not have the ability to automatically do calculations in a table. It does have the ability to show a lot of complicated equations, but those are basically just for display, they don't actually calculate anything. However, what PowerPoint also lets you do is insert an Excel spreadsheet directly into a slide. Once you do that, you can use formulas just like when you're working directly in Excel. Word has the same functionality of inserting an Excel worksheet into a document. Of course, the problem with inserting an Excel object is that you're limited in display area, making it less practical for large data sets. I personally wouldn't use this for anything other than displaying very simple tables in Word or PowerPoint documents. If I needed people to be able to see more information than comfortably fits on a page, I'd send them directly to Excel.

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