{"id":6013,"date":"2022-10-11T01:00:25","date_gmt":"2022-10-11T07:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/?p=6013"},"modified":"2022-09-14T15:22:27","modified_gmt":"2022-09-14T21:22:27","slug":"do-you-have-a-love-hate-relationship-with-excel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/do-you-have-a-love-hate-relationship-with-excel\/","title":{"rendered":"Do You Have A Love-Hate Relationship with Excel?"},"content":{"rendered":"\r\n<p>Few people take the time to learn how to use even basic formulas in Excel. I even found data to prove it. How much more effective could you be if you learn a little bit more about Excel?<\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"https:\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/748331738?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0\" width=\"720\" height=\"405\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><span data-mce-type=\"bookmark\" style=\"display: inline-block; width: 0px; overflow: hidden; line-height: 0;\" class=\"mce_SELRES_start\">\ufeff<\/span><\/iframe><\/p>\r\n\r\n\r\n\r\n<p>&#8220;Hi, I\u2019m Jay Arthur, author of \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/Lean-Six-Sigma-Demystified-Second\/dp\/0071749098\/\">Lean Six Sigma Demystified<\/a>\u201d and <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/demo\/\">QI Macros [software]<\/a>.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Many years ago I went to an Excelapalooza conference. I know, &#8216;Excelapalooza&#8217; sounds funky, doesn&#8217;t it? But it was interesting.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;We had one of the leaders of the Excel development team there and she was talking about all the new features and everything else that they&#8217;re plugging in, but she gave me some startling statistics. Evidently, Microsoft tracks these things: Less than five percent of Excel spreadsheets have a formula in them.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;What?! That&#8217;s one of the secret powers of Microsoft Excel: a formula, so you can add, subtract, multiply, divide&#8230; do things like that. In the QI Macros I use those so extensively to create control chart formulas and everything else. I don&#8217;t give it a second thought, but obviously a lot of people do.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;The other thing she announced was that 50-something percent of them used \u2018merge and center.\u2019 I can tell you \u2018merge and center\u2019 is designed to create headings over spreadsheets that have manually entered numbers. Wow, that&#8217;s a waste of time. (By the way, \u2018<a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/free-excel-tips\/customize-ribbon-format-cells\/\">center across selection<\/a>\u2019 works much better than \u2018merge and center\u2019 if you want to try and chart or graph anything, so just stay away from \u2018merge and center.\u2019)<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;People often tell me they have a love\/hate relationship with Excel. Well, I\u2019m going to suggest to you that you don&#8217;t need to know everything there is to know about Excel. I only know about this much, and I\u2019m pretty sure there&#8217;s that much, all right? But I know a lot of good things, and I want you to think about \u201cWell, maybe I\u2019ll learn how to use a formula to add some things.\u201d On the QI Macros website we have some <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/free-excel-tips\/functions-and-features\/\">things about Excel<\/a> about just how to set up spreadsheets for QI Macros: how to analyze data, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/qi-macros\/excel-formulas-template\/\">how to do formulas<\/a> and do stuff like that.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;Go spend a little time learning one new thing. Go to YouTube, learn one new thing about how to use Excel and I\u2019m guaranteeing you over time you add a little and a little and you&#8217;ll be a superstar, at least compared to everybody around you because they&#8217;re still using \u2018merge and center,\u2019 entering numbers into a spreadsheet. If you&#8217;re just going to do that, oh my gosh, just use Google Sheets. You don&#8217;t need Excel.<\/p>\r\n<p>&#8220;So that&#8217;s my Improvement Insight for this week: Let&#8217;s learn how to use the tools that we have even more effectively than we do now. Let&#8217;s go out and improve something this week. &#8220;<\/p>\r\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Few people take the time to learn how to use even basic formulas in Excel. I even found data to prove it. How much more effective could you be if you learn a little bit more about Excel? &#65279; &ldquo;Hi, I&rsquo;m Jay Arthur, author of &ldquo;Lean Six Sigma Demystified&rdquo; and QI Macros [software]. &ldquo;Many years [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":6060,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[175,290],"tags":[41,215,168],"class_list":["post-6013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-excel","category-improvement-insights","tag-excel","tag-excel-and-formulas-for-spc-charts","tag-qi-macros"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6013"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6013\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6095,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6013\/revisions\/6095"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6060"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.qimacros.com\/lean-six-sigma-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}