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How to make MORE use of the“Spreadsheet”

~Japanese style~

2013 December 6 19:301000 Speakers Conference in English 1

Entry #9: Yosuke Kato

This is a joke presentation, but I'm not joking...

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Spreadsheet – a powerful software

● The spreadsheet is a necessary software for our everyday business

● There are choices for the spreadsheet

– Excel (de-facto standard)

– Calc (Libreoffice / OpenOffice)

– 1-2-3 (used to be popular)

– 三四郎(Sanshiro) (Japan local)

– And many others

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Simulation – a normal use case

● A table with numbers and formulae to calculate and simulate something

● It can help us visualize the numbers with graphs

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List – another normal use case

● Make some lists (e.g. to-do list)

– People tend to write many words in a cell, and a cell can often be too high to display

Some comments under the display

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Spreadsheet – a multi-purpose software

● The use case is a bit different in Japan

– Everyone knows “Excel”, not “Spreadsheet”

– Excel is the powerful and only-one tool to use, i.e.

● Word : A complicated notepad● PowerPoint : DTP software for some people● Access : Something weired

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“Grid” – prepare to use Excel

● When you start using Excel, you have to make a “Grid” style template

– Select all columns

– Make the width as it looks same as the height

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Word Processor – a popular use case

● Now you have a grid sheet very useful as a word processor

– Easy to control the indents

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Ruled form – the “form” means this style

● Easy to make ruled form using borders

– Most of official application form is divided into many boxes to fill out using this style

● You can also merge the cells for your convenience

Advanced case(1) Font-size adjusted height(2) Thinner columns for more precise adjustment

Downloaded from Ministry of Defence websitehttp://www.mod.go.jp/epco/dfaa/news/kensetsu/touroku/2526touroku.html

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Drawing – Isn't it a graph paper?

● Excel has light gray border lines, which can be used for drawing figures

● Even if you drew a large figure, just use “fit size” when you print

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Page break & Sheets

● You can manually break the page, and you can also use as many sheets as you want

– Good for composing the book with many sections

Manual page breaks

1 sheet for 1 section

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Database – for advanced users

● Excel has many rows : over 1 million

● Excel has powerful functions, Auto filter & VLOOKUP

● Maybe useful : LEFT, RIGHT, CONCATENATE

● Something complicated : MATCH

Note:The records are automatically generated dummy data.

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Summary

● Excel, a multi-purpose, all-round software

– As a word processor

– As a form designer

– As a drawing software

– As a book composer

– As a database● Even more

– Calculation, Graph, Lists...etc

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Joking?

● I wish these cases were jokes

● In Japan,

– Excel is really used as a word processor

– Most form is provided as an Excel file with many boxes to fill in

– You can easily find the file with many sheets, and each sheet has many pages

– You'll get the file with more than 10,000 dirty records

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You are wise enough...

● Please consider,

– Do you want to solve the problem, or use Excel?

– Is Excel really a better tool for you?

– Does your tool help you solve the issue, or make you solve another issue?

● There are much much margin to improve the productivity in your everyday work

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So...

STOP WASTING YOUR TIME!時間の無駄遣いはやめましょう！