Is Microsoft Excel a good tool for dealing with calculations and summaries? Absolutely! There’s no better spreadsheet tool on the market, at least that I’m aware of. And when it comes to dealing with day-to-day business activities, most users are very capable of using it for their purposes. But how much of Excel’s capabilities does the average user , well… use?
I recall reading an article several years ago that said the average user only used about 10% of Excel’s true capabilities. Ten percent! That’s all!!! (Funny thing – I think that’s like the portion of our brains that we use on a day to day basis.) Let’s say things have improved lots over the past few years… let’s say we now use 20%.
So if Excel is such a fantastic tool for all our varied purposes, why then do we use only about one-fifth of its capabilities???
Could it be that the small portion that we do use is pretty easy to understand, but the rest of it is pretty hard? Could it be that the real strengths of Excel lie in the stuff we already use it for… and the rest really isn’t its forte?
There’s a saying that goes something like this: “It’s like using a hammer to put in a screw”. Or put another way, “It’s like using a cannon to kill a mosquito”. None of us would ever do that, right? We’d want to find the right tool for the job. The good old KISS principle.
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