What makes Excel user friendly?

Answer 1

"User friendly" is a relative term. Will Rogers, a famous American entertainer of the 1930s, it credited with saying, "Everyone is ignorant -- but on different issues." No matter how easy a software program is for those who use it all the time, it presents a challenge to the first-time user.

If you have not used Excel before, I recommend you learn with Excel 2007. Microsoft spend a lot of money and time to develop a menu system for MS Office 2007 that is more intuitive and easier to learn that any previous version of Office (including Excel). If you are an experienced user of Excel 2003 or earlier, you will hate the new menu ribbon. But, if Excel is new to you, then so is the menu ribbon.

Excel (and all spreadsheet applications) originally was designed to replicate the work of using a manual ledger. Pages in some ledgers were called spreadsheets, and the name transferred from the paper product to the electronic one. Originally, when someone transitioned from a paper spreadsheet to an electronic one, the transition was not too painful, because the process was the same and the computer did all the arithmetic for you -- saving hours of tedious updates if you had to change one entry.

Those who use an electonic spreadsheet for the first time, not only have to learn how the program works, but also has to learn the process of organizing and working on a spreadsheet layout. Overall, I think those who do not have to deal with all of the arithmetic become productive much more quickly than those who spend hours tracking down an arithmetic error on line 123 of a 250 line manual spreadsheet.

Answer 2

bob