Why this matters
If you read data job adverts in Ghana, one tool appears again and again: the spreadsheet. NGO M&E teams track indicators in Excel. Banks and telcos send daily reports as spreadsheets. Data entry and reporting roles ask for strong Excel before anything else. A small business in Bolgatanga may never use a database, but it will happily pay someone who can turn its sales notebook into a sheet that answers questions.
The good news is that you can learn almost everything you need for free, on a phone or a basic laptop, with Google Sheets. Microsoft Excel works the same way for the skills in this section, so what you learn transfers directly. When an advert says Excel, your Google Sheets practice counts.
What a spreadsheet does well
A spreadsheet is a grid of cells. Each cell holds a value, such as a name, a date or an amount, or a formula that calculates something from other cells. Because formulas update automatically, you can change one number and see every total change with it. That makes spreadsheets ideal for:
- Keeping records in a tidy table, one row per record.
- Answering questions with formulas: how much, how many, which is biggest.
- Joining information from two lists, such as prices and sales.
- Summarising large tables into small ones with pivot tables.
- Charting results for a report or dashboard.