Why spreadsheets matter for work in Ghana
Walk into almost any office in Tamale, Wa or Accra and you will find a spreadsheet doing important work. A rural bank tracks loan repayments in one. An NGO in Bolgatanga counts how many farmers attended each training. A pharmacy keeps its stock list in one, and the accounts officer builds the monthly report from it. Job adverts for accounts officers, MIS officers, monitoring and evaluation (M&E) staff and administrators keep asking for the same thing: confident Excel skills.
The good news is that you do not need an expensive computer or a paid licence to start. Everything in this first section works in free Excel for the web, the free Excel app, or Google Sheets.
What a spreadsheet is
A spreadsheet is a grid. Columns are named with letters (A, B, C) and rows with numbers (1, 2, 3). Where a column and a row meet is a cell, and every cell has an address such as B4, which means column B, row 4. A file is called a workbook, and one workbook can hold several sheets, shown as tabs along the bottom.
A cell can hold three kinds of things:
- Text, such as a name or a district.
- Numbers, such as a price in cedis or a date (Excel stores dates as numbers behind the scenes).