1-This week we learned how Excel can help to present and understand data for a company. Throughout Chapter 1 and 2, we see that Excel spreadsheets can be used to present data, total data, and display a summary of information for managers and owners to make more informed financial decisions. Excel has been useful in helping companies understand “big data” and in performing increasingly complex data analytics as well. Review the article included below and discuss the advantages and disadvantages that Excel has in helping navigate databases, big data, and data analytics. Be sure to note your source and in-text citations in APA format. Article – Excel and big data – Office Blogs.pdf Sharma, Ashvini and Ellis, Charlie. (2016) “Excel and big data”. Office Blogs. Retrieved from: https://blogs.office.com/en-us/2016/06/23/excel-and-big-data/ 2-Look at the attached Excel file which contains two column charts identifying data for a company: Week 1 Discussion Topic 2 Ethics.xls. Notice that the data is depicted differently, however, the data presented is really the same. Is it ethical to present data in a different way in order to make the data appear more favorable? Explain your reasoning.

Excel Data Analysis

Advantages and Disadvantages of excel

One of the benefits of excel that can be mentioned is its ability to organize big amounts of data into well orderly and logical spreadsheets and chats. An organized data is a lot easier to analyze and interpret making meaning for what it really means.  When other visual data representations like graphs and charts are used, the information in the data looks simply to understand. Thus, excel is able to help a big data analyst to discover trends and other data patterns which might be very critical in decision-making processes (Cook, 2016).  The calculations that are tedious to make by a calculator or at a personal level have been made easier and every calculation can be explained why it has been made from the excel spreadsheets.

Disadvantages of excel

Cook 2016 posits that one of the major disadvantages with excel is that its ability to share the documents is not easy like other tools like google docs can be shared. It is cumbersome since certain tools must be installed in the PC to allow such transactions.

Ethical Issues

The data that is in excel has been represented twice with the same meaning of the data through different figures. It is unethical to make such entries since it contradicts the true picture that a data should depict. When a data has been altered, the interpretation will be affected at some point. When a graph is supposed to be drawn or a chart representation is needed, a false interpretation will be seen as such, bad judgment will be made when decisions are supposed to be reached concerning the data collected. Altering data is bad since it affects the integrity of the data and thus affects the patterns of the data (Levine, 1999). For instance, when there is a continuous pattern of data that has been monitored for a duration of time when such a false entry is made, a skewed pattern might be developed hence misinforming the data analysts. Data manipulation is thus costly as it will affect the integrity of the original data, might mislead data interpretation, the pattern of occurrence, affect graphical interpretation and finally influence the decision making of the intention for which the data was meant to serve.

References

Cook, S. (2016). Advantages of Microsoft Excel.  Turbo Future. [Online]. Retrieved from https://turbofuture.com/computers/Advantages-of-Microsoft-Excel

Levine, D. M., Berenson, M. L., Stephan, D., & Lysell, D. (1999). Statistics for managers using

Microsoft Excel (Vol. 660). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall.