My First Class in Basic Excel Class By Dr. Francis Okoye

His first day at our EMBA 27 class, he asked us to garde ourselves in the use of excel from 1 – 10. A lot of us indicated indicated above average including me. But alas, we were stunned when he stated unfolding a lot of basics we never knew about. We looked completely stupid and as someone who had never seen nor used excel package before.

The class was an eye opener for us and majority of us had to go back to the basics of excel training. Aside the dexterity with which he delivers his lecture, he was very patient taking us through the class over and over again. Well, I am not surprised as I later noticed that majority of the LBS lecturers are simply trained to be drawn back to explain things they had explained before. The patience and humility with which this is done is highly commendable.

A lot of my classmates are just excel beginners; some don’t even have any idea of the use of excel. It is as bad as that. Dr. Francis Okoye encouraged us to practice more with the excel formulars and also tried to pair us with some that are averagely good with the use of the application. We organised informal virtual classes in where we taught ourselves some basics with the use of excel funtions. Thanks to Tunji, a colleague for one of the informal virtual sessions we organised. He was down to earth with his teaching techniques and approch to imparting knowledge. The memories of the informal class lingers till date.

Coming back to the excel class by Dr. Okoye, we also learnt how to present a simple life situations with probaility distributions in an excel format with accompanying chats for better analysis. Accoding to him, we have just started as we still have a lot of experieces to encounter on the way through this path.

We also learnt that an excel workbook has 10,484,576 cells, 1,048,576 rows and 16,384 columns. The Excel workbook has different worksheets. The formulars in excel has a long cut and also a short cut approach. Some functions of the excels were taught like how to filter both colun and rows, freeze panes, Pivot tables, conditional formattings, excel charts presebtations and so on.

Excel knowledge could simplify a lot of calculations for management decisions – like making forecast, preparing models, Management accounts and other reporting metrics as could be desired for decision making. It is a tool most managers like to use because of its simplicity and ease of adaptation to suit a purpose.

Excel is also a tool for stastical analysis. Mean (Averages), median and mode including other statistical measurements like standard deviations and tables of frequency can all be achieved with the use of Excel. Dr Okoye Francis together with Dr. Bongo Adi are presently doing justice to this as they take us on the journey of using Excel applications in solving a lot of problems in statistics.

I will forever be grateful to these lecturers.