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How do you explain Excel to a small kid? [poll]

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What is Excel? How do you explain Excel to a small kid?When I was in Perth, I visited Hui’s house one day. Lovely, Hui’s daughter (who is about 14) asked Hui how he knew me. Hui told that we both share a passion for Excel and thats how we got to know each other. Then she asked, What is Excel?

At this point, we both tried to explain what Excel is to her in a few ways with no success. Later Hui came up with a brilliant explanation.

He said, Excel has lots of small calculators all interconnected, so that you can do any sort of calculation.

So here is a challenge for you. How would you explain Excel to a small kid (or someone who never heard about it).

Share your answers using comments.

Go ahead and be funny, outrageous, creative or elaborate. Say something.

* click here to comment.

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145 Responses to “How do you explain Excel to a small kid? [poll]”

  1. Hui says:

    Chandoo forgot to add, that after we explained to Lovely what a spreadsheet is, she commented "Oh, you mean Numbers".
    I'd forgotten that she uses a Mac for School.

  2. John says:

    It is like a maths book and a colour book all rolled in to one!

  3. Tyler says:

    I tell my kids and others who ask what I do, that I look at little numbers in slightly larger boxes. Sometimes  I add up the column.

  4. Sini says:

    My 8 year daughter uses excel for school projects like bar / column charts etc. I have created an Excel times table game for her to practice.
    I explained to her that Excel is like a net for catching numbers!.

    • Kathy says:

      Can you share the times table game? My son needs some help in that area....

      • Hui... says:

        @Kathy

        Why not make one yourself?

        Basic Instructions below:
        Say in two cells A2 and A3
        type =Randbetween(1,20)
        In A4 add a Conditional Format =A4=A2*A3
        and set a CF say a Red Bold Font
        Copy the 3 cells across / down to make a grid
        Save the file as "TimesTable_Blank"
        Copy the whole table area and paste values
        Save the file as Times Table No 1
        Give to your son
        The CF's will show when an answer is wrong

        You can add Links to set the Min/Max values for use in the Randbetween, more Worksheet Formatting, CF for Correct Answers and lots more Bells and Whistles

        Just reload the "TimesTable_Blank" file when you want a new file
        Press F9 to recalculate new values
        Copy/paste values again
        Re-save as a new file name

        You could also Automate the last part as you will do that regularly

        • Karen says:

          Can you give a little more in-depth explanation on how to create the CFs?  I've never done it before.  I've tried but it's not working.  THANKS

  5. Darin says:

    When I am leaving for work, I always tell my son, "I am off to put numbers in boxes." To this day I think he still thinks I mean cardboard boxes.

  6. Hello Kid,

    Microsoft Excel is the world's most advanced calculator. It has the ability to calculate numbers as well as words!

  7. Krok says:

    Hey Kid,
    Kid:
    What is excel?
     
    Me:
    Don't bother me: I'm trying to cure cancer on it!
     
    (okay, overselling the excel capability, but even so...)
    Wikipedia: The overshooting model or the exchange rate overshooting hypothesis, first developed by economist Rudi Dornbusch, is a theoretical explanation for high exchange rate volatility. ?

  8. Ben Niebuhr says:

    Excel is kind of like the Mr. Fusion powering the time machine at the end of "Back to the Future". You put garbage in and get something useful out, e.g., wisdom, direction, movement, time travel, etc.

  9. Kamal Kumar says:

    Excel is the tool to for you (Child) to leart maths on fast track or

  10. Kamal Kumar says:

    NA

  11. Cherrill Mears says:

    Excel is an app Santa Claus uses to figure out how many toys to make for all the children each Christmas.

  12. RAGHAVAN says:

    EXCEL IS A PLACE WHERE WE CAN STORE  NUMBERS NAMES ETC  . AND RETREEV THE SAME IMMDIATELY

    WE CAN PERFOM CALCULATIONS ON  HE NUMBERS

    WE CAN ALSO LEARN MATHS

  13. Alee says:

    Excel is something so that you never have to calculate by hand (using pencil or calculator) again.

  14. Diana W says:

    I have not tried to explain Excel to a small child, but I have tried to explain it to my mother who wonders how I can spend so much of my day working with virtual grid paper....when I told her that the boxes can "know" what is in them and "do" stuff to that info she looked at me like I had sprouted a horn.... sigh. 🙂

  15. Verne says:

    Excel is like a massive sheet of paper - but you can only see a small portion of it.  It is like running a magnifying glass over the big sheet of paper, and seeing only that little bit.  The fun part is that each visible portion is linked to the invisible rest!  Magic!

  16. Keith Burns says:

    It's how we draw pictures with numbers.

  17. AC says:

    I would say that Excel is a computer program used by companies for business as well as individuals like you and I.  The companies use it primarily for creating reports and performing calculations, similar to using a calculator.  They also use it for analysis to understand how their business is performing.  An example would be to see how many shipments were made last month.  Individuals use it for analysis as well, for such things as tracking calorie count, creating to do lists, or capturing inventory.  For example we could track to see how many cookies you eat each month! (And end with a tickle, because ever explanation to a child should)

  18. I think I would avoid the math at first. Most non-techies have mathophobia, even for simple arithmetic. I would start explaining how great Excel is for organizing data; recipes, "where things are", etc. This is something most people would appreciate. Access is much more complicated, and Excel will do for about 95% of the rest of us. Explaining this use does not require any mathematics, and therefore would not immediately freak out the mathophobes.

  19. Phil S says:

    Excel is a program that let's us read and write stories about our business in numbers.

  20. Corinne Tabb says:

    I would tell children Excel is a tool we used to make and keep lists of persons, places, or things. Important details are kept along with each person, place or thing along with the date and time when this happened. We can use these details to tell a story for each person , place or thing on our list.   The story might be telling us how many of the things we sold in January last year as compared with January this year. It could tell us how many people were counted in different categories or groups.  It could show us places and how many people live in that place in different months within different years.   All of these stories can be made by the calculations Excel can do and this can be made into pretty colorful pictures called charts and graphs. 

  21. Ernst Lohse says:

    Excel is like LEGO toys, but with figures and numbers. When you get the hang of it you can build your own solutions, just like you do with LEGO toys.

  22. Carl B says:

    EXCEL is very intelligent graph paper that allows us to organize stuff by columns and rows

  23. Johann says:

    It is a puzzle solving machine for big people.

  24. Bobbie Jo says:

    Excel is a computer program that uses the universal language of numbers that will be used to cure all diseases, solve world hunger and provide world peace.

  25. JoElla Horrocks says:

    Excel is the most brilliant of all Microsoft products.  It can be used for anything having to do with numbers or data.  It organizes data that can then be shown visually in the form of a chart, graph, slicer, etc.

  26. Dom says:

    "Son, when two sets of data love each other very, very much..."

    I tell my son it's like a big calculator. A couple months ago, I used it to illustrate fractions for my 7 y.o.

  27. Jason S says:

    I recently had this same conversation with my 15 year old daughter. I explained that excel is like a visual calculator. You can do complicated calculations and see all of the detail used to come up with your answer. Then if you need to update one value within the calculation, you can do that without starting over.

  28. Kelly says:

    It is a tool for helping convince the people for whom we work that we really know what we are doing. :-0)

  29. Nag says:

    Son, Excel helps grownups doing (tedious) Maths homework

  30. Chula says:

    Excel is a computer software where you can answer those annoying "What IF" questions.  It can also do complex math proglems in a "Jiffy"

  31. Sathyan Nadumana says:

    Excel is a Note Book which grows in size when you write more information, and add more pages.  You can use it as a calculator, graph, text editor, and automate your work too.  

  32. Neil says:

    Excel is a posh calculator that grown-ups use, to make it look like they are doing more work than they actually are.

  33. Tori says:

    My 10-year-old son asked me not too long ago what a data analyst does. I explained that companies need to understand their businesses, so they use people like me. We pull all the stats out of the computer and analyze them. For example, say we have a list of orders, and by looking at the cities that our products sell in, we can find that one product does really well in the South, but no one buys it in California. 

    Then I explained that asking that question once wouldn't really help much - and that we don't want to have to go thru hours and hours of work every time we want to know the answer to these questions, so Mommy writes programs so all you have to do is run a macro and we see what's happening now. He understands what "data charts" are ("Mommy makes the prettiest data charts"), so he gets the idea.

    Then I overheard him talking to a friend about what Mom and Dad do for a living. Dad sells stuff on the Internet (i.e. Dad is a website administrator) and Mom makes magic buttons. 

  34. JohnC_UK says:

    With Excel you put numbers in boxes. you can then add them, subtract them or multiply them in other boxes.

    When you change any number all the other boxes change without having to use a rubber.

    So, Excel saves loads of rubber. Enough rubber each year to make over a billion condoms!

    • JohnC_UK says:

      I got carried away. Sorry!

      I would prefer the last line to be:

      So, Excel saves loads of rubber. Enough rubber each year to make over a million rubber ducks!

  35. Michael says:

    so....... No ONE really knows what Excel is!!!!!!  That is some funny stuff right there, I don't care who you are 🙂

  36. Anuj says:

    Excel is like spider man. Excel has wroksheet , same as web of spiderman . Both have super power. Like spiderman makes city safe , excel makes work place safe.  🙂

  37. Dan says:

    The first step to teach the kid at a very young age , may be 2 , 4  or 5 year old how to count is using the fingers. 1,2,3,4 and 5. So, one hand 5 numbers, 2 hand 10 numbers. If each finger is assigned to a friend and if you have say 15 friends or something like that how would you calculate if you have to give 1 choclate to a girl and 1 apple to a boy. It would be too hard to do it using the fingers and you will end up entering on a paper and if you have something that contains columns and rows, that would be very easy. And that is all excel does and more ..

  38. seapea says:

    At its simplest, it's electronic graph paper that performs infinite magic with numbers.

  39. Alpana says:

    Excel is like a mix in mathematical claculations from 1st class / 10th class/PU/Engg level.

     Its a magic tool with several functions of maths....

  40. Lukas says:

    Excel is like a box of crayons, except in this box we keep information. You can write things with it, draw pretty pictures, or even have the picture drawn for you. What really important though is how you use this box of crayons, because some people draw better than others.

  41. Hema Shah says:

    I would describe as below to a kid on what Excel is:
    Easy eXecutions for Computing Every Logical mathematical functions.

    Best Regards,
    Hema Shah

  42. Bob says:

    A tool to help people like Dora explore numbers.

  43. Andy Dutch says:

    Excel is like a maths table of numbers and stuff(!!!) that can calculate really complicated things.

  44. Anna says:

    Excel is like a modern technological abacus. My husband asked me if I really use that explanation to a child and I said yes. I can show the child an image of an abacus and it' purpose. So I asked him, how would he explain it to a child and he responded, 'smart graph paper'.

  45. I would explain Excel to a young kid this way.....

    Excel is a way to store information and find it when you need it again without having to remember it in your mind.... 
    Excel is a fun way to analyze anything....
    Excel is a tool like the crayon to record stuff....
    Excel is a way to draw diagrams without having to learn how to create them...
    Excel is a way to connect with others using numbers rather than words..
    Excel is a way to avoid learning complicated formulas,functions but yet benefiting by their use....
    Excel is a way to use other's wisdom and knowledge to make one's life easier and better......
    Excel is a way to share what you know and learnt work for others as well....

    How is that for a start? 

  46. Donna Dodd says:

    Excel looks like an endless stack of card houses or blocks with a caculator inside each one.

  47. Nathan Bartlett says:

    It is a program where you go to wrestle, wrangle, highlight or spotlight numbers... You can put them in a pie (not cherry or blueberry), scatter plot'em...  and with the help of Chandoo, make them do some magic tricks!

  48. Mark Broadhead says:

    Its thousands of really clever calculators that can talk to each other and tell you what they find

  49. Richard Tidy says:

    Excel is a program that allows you organise numbers and summarise data into information. ~Using the premise that Information is data out of context~

  50. bobhc says:

     
    Excel is a mathematical software program developed by Microsoft to try and make Access look good
     

  51. Mohammed Mustafa says:

    I am trying to get my 10 year old daughter to learn excel...i try to make her learn  vlookup using a data table for the students of her class, so she has to try and look up all the students grades...
    Another easy way is to make a multiplication table and let the kids have fun at it..... 

  52. Harry Papadopoulos says:

    Excel is like a Jigsaw Puzzle, only you are the one who gets to figure out what the picture will be, then you have to go about getting all the pixels to work together to make that picture.
    Or.
    Excel is like hundreds and thousands of TVs next to each other. If you can get the right frequency in each of the little TVs, they will end up being one big TV screen.

  53. Peter Taylor says:

    Well...let me think for a moment....

    Ah! I have heard people talking about Excel is a calculator, a maths blackboard, you know what!

    I think Excel is a big, really BIG toy box on this screen here, it has may places to hold your toys, your dolls, your books and some stuff you find to put into Excel's toy box and no not your ipad game you are pointing there!

    So yeah! This toy box can hold words like your name and numbers like your how old you are or where numbers you learnt at school lately, hold lovely shapes like a smiley face you like to doodle in art, huh-huh!

    And...and...and... can do magic stuff like flashing colours, showing it up like it does at Christmas time, yeah!

    Best of all, if you come to me sometimes crying because you can't find a toy, well Excel can help look for these toys we put there in Excel toy box if we need this for later. Huh-huh!

    We need to ask Excel kindly with some ideas what is it we need to find and Excel will go and fetch sniffing or looking at all these boxes it has like a puppy does, bringing back something if it finds or none at all!

    However, like a puppy, sometimes it wants to goes out and dig into these boxes which often make these toys look like something else perhaps better.

    Not only that, did you know that Excel likes to draw as we do, it can sketch   lines and draw all kinds of shapes.

    Does that make sense kid? 

  54. Vinod Hemdev says:

    Excel is an EXCELlent calculator

  55. Jill says:

    Kid, Excel helps adults do a lot of work even when they get lazy. It works wonders, like magic! 😀

  56. Arul says:

    Excel is like a Swiss army knife for all those who work with numbers, like accountants, engineers, surveyors, teachers and a whole lot of people, it may look bulky (like some of the big Swiss army knifes).
    You will grow to love it when you start using it.   

  57. s.d her says:

    Hi..all

    it's interesting topic!!

    i would explain like...

    it's the best tool to define your VAGUE Ideas  into Specific ideas

    if you want to make your dream come true, use excel!!

    then later you'll realize what i talk!!   

  58. Ahtesham says:

    Hey kid,

    Excel is the colourful aggregation of all your work books.

  59. Brett Ellingson says:

    My wife said: "it's a chart that lets you organize information. You can also teach it to do certain kinds of math so you don't have to"

    I thought about it and decided that my wife's definition was more or less perfect 🙂 

  60. Ranjeet Kumar says:

    Sir, this very interesting & Challengint task for guardians to make understand kids what is excel.

  61. Excel is a device to play with numbers

  62. Shreeram Giri says:

    That device which keeps everyone happy, especially your boss.

  63. Biswajit says:

    Excel is a way to represent your data(name, place, cost any thing) in table( not a dining table) format. Do not underestimate kids by the way !!

  64. kiran.S.N. says:

    Excel is a collection of various mathematical calculations in a different ways in colour full manner.

  65. Waqas Saeed says:

    Excel is an electronic book where you can create a friend list along with their contact details, can assign a numeric priority.
    It can be helpful to complete your math work, you can perform all sorts of calculations with no efforts.
    You can also play with excel.

  66. Monika says:

    Hi Kids,
    Excel is like your math book (the one with boxes) only much much bigger. The magic part is that after entering the numbers in the boxes, it will do anything that you ask it to with the numbers - add, substract, multiply divide, draw and much much more. Even look at the numbers and tell you what you are searching for -long after you have forgotten what numbers you have put into it. Last month, last year.....It is a big pile of maths notebooks kept some where in your small computer..It takes away your maths fear! If you put in your numbers correctly, it will NEVER give you a wrong answer to your question. Now, if that is not magic for a kid, what is?

  67. Shabbir says:

    I would say Excel is a software application for businessman, acountant, engineer, doctor, scientist, student, ....., any one can do anything, from simple calculation to complicated application programs, simple word processing to charts and graphics, only thing is you should be clever enough to use it the way you want and dear Chandoo your doing a great job in enlighting people on how to use it in different ways. Thanks

  68. Ambi says:

    Excel is an maths expert .. It comprises of  Newton,  pythagoras, Euclid, gauss, Euler....,.

  69. Viney Mehta says:

    Excel Look Like a web / net of Spider Man..... & in the web / net mathematical Calculations are captured ..like that web calculations can be of any shape and size.........and at end like Spider Man......it saves us from manual & lengthy Calculations....

  70. I would say,

    Hey kid....

    Excel is a way to play with numbers...
    Excel is a crayon to make pictures (charts & cubes) from those numbers,
    Excel is a different way to see and understand the world around us
    Excel is a way to talk with numbers and have them tell stories
    Excel is a way to make complex math work for us
    Excel is a way solve mysteries
    Excel is a tool to help others and have fun doing so   
    Excel is a way to collect, store and use numbers and whatever-else and figure-out what they mean.... 

  71. Anne Walsh says:

    I would say - imagine a huge piece of graph paper that can do MAGIC - you can put colours in one place and they appear somewhere else. You can put numbers into different boxes and then you can make magic. and you can make a picture out of numbers... 🙂 

  72. Michiel van Deenen says:

    How about - Excel is a toy for grownups?

  73. According to my opinion," Excel is composed of two words one is Extension and another is Cell. Therefore we may call "Excel" means the extension of cell or cells used for various calculations. 

  74. Irfan Kaleel says:

    Excel is a creative library....and the best assistant to anyone who wants to play with numbers...

  75. Faseeh says:

    I would tell him/her that "....a tool with which you can complete your math home work super-fast" 🙂

  76. venkatesh says:

    FOr a Kid excel is some thing where you put 1,2,3 or a,b,c in a cell and drag it you will get the other numbers/letters automatically..... hehe he

  77. Sohan Singh says:

    I told him/her that, Excel is a collection of mathematical cells by using that you can make the magic of math.

  78. Manish says:

    Excel is like a math workbook. You can do your math homework and even visualize the results!

  79. Rajinikanth S says:

    It is a Mathematical Note Book where calculation is done.

  80. Daniel A. says:

    To a curious child I would say Excel is a sophisticated calculator

  81. Ishav Arora says:

    Like super computers...Excel is a super calculator!!!!

  82. Pat says:

    Excel is an app that helps you sort and organize information (like lists of toys or friend's birthdays) and play with numbers, words, and pictures.  

    You can even make your own apps in Excel, but to do that, you have to learn how to talk to Excel.  It has many built-in formulas, like a calculator, allowing you to add or multiple numbers, but instead of having a different button for each action or formula, you type special Excel words and it will do the work for you.  Excel is so powerful, that if it did have a (typically sized calculator) button for each special action that it can do, the calculator would be as big as a door!

  83. Montrey says:

    Tell the child this.

    "what is excel? It is where anything is possible" 

  84. deerajks says:

    "Maths" Playground !! 🙂

  85. If the kid is a little bit older, say 17 or 18, I would add;

    Excel is a way to win an argument, compassionately (i.e., without hormones getting in the way) using the head rather than the heart...

    Excel is a way to behave maturely when dealing with adults....

    Excel is way to use advanced math without really understanding them to get what you want or need....

    Excel is a way to get out of drudgery work..... 

  86. Rolando says:

    Excel is like a boyfriend or a girlfrined, but Excel will always do what ever you want if you tell it in its language. That nice language is called Math. You will have so nice times with excel if you learn its language. That's Excel

  87. Cesarino says:

    The excel is like a chessboard. 
    The peons are the numbers and the letters, the towers are the subtotals and grand totals, horses jump the rules, bishops pray the instructions,the queen filter the actions and the king orders the operations and in the end it is presented with a beautiful color graphics and 3D.

  88. Rajesh says:

    Excel is a computer inside a computer.

  89. Nazmul Muneer says:

    Excel is the easiest way to calculate, store and represent report as you need

  90. Kuldeep Jain says:

    Excel is a simulation of math. For Kids, Excel is a combination of diary & biggest calculator where they can put the their questions, answers, references for use, whenever they are needed.
     

  91. Munna says:

    Hello..kids..

    You know vey well about caluculator.
    Similarly EXCEL is a tool more than like caluculator. Simply we can say 'Caluculator Book' in which we can do complex maths, draw graphs and also save it for further reference.

  92. Manish says:

    Excel is a big sheet of paper where we can do calculations and keep data organised.

  93. Ash says:

    An easy way to learn your maths

  94. Margaret says:

    EXCEL is a 'blackbox' of mathematical possibilities - those with the capability (like Chandoo and his students) have the knowledge and the key, to unlock the treasure trove.

  95. The below composition is an analogy explaining a basic understanding of Excel. The hope is to create an enlightening mental image in the mind of a small kid or a person that has never heard of Excel:
     
    Imagine you are proud farmer enjoying the view of your extremely large field of flowers. As far as your eyes can see, there are beautiful flowers of all colors lined up in straight even rows.
     
    In your field of flowers, each flower has a special name given to it and no two flowers are the same. Because, you the farmer trained your bees, they buzz around all day knowing exactly which flower needs visited and pollen added or taken away.

  96. Marco says:

    a potion mixing pot for finance magicians !

  97. Sunitha says:

    It is similar to the first Maths notebook with rows and columns.  In the book, the calculation are done by us.  But Excel does calculations based on the function given by us.

  98. Ariyo says:

    Long ago we use sheet of paper, ruler, pencil and calculator to work our report all together in harmony, then everything changed when calculation become more complex and our boss need more, more information even graphs and we have little time with monster date, the deadline.
    Only Excel The Avatar Master of all element, (calculation, programming language,pivot table, macros, graph etc) could help us, and everyone who use excel can be Avatar, but as a new Avatar there is a lot to learn before we ready to save anyone.
    But From the first day i met and use excel, i believed excel would save the world 😛
     
     

  99. Gaurav Shah says:

    An amazing chequered place where you can perform/solve all your calcualtions !

  100. ashwini says:

    excel is  an intersection of vertical and horizantal lines where   you can add subrstract and do many math calculations . 

  101. Jay says:

    Excel makes mathematics simpler & easier, with its help u can even draw graphs within No time.

  102. kartik gada says:

    excel is similar to the boxed notebooks the children get at school for mathematics. it is a large sheet with boxes all over the place wherein you can perform all sorts of calculations.

  103. John Hackwood (john@reddybay) says:

    I would say...

    Excel is the most underrated invention of the 20th Century.  It's the language of business.  It calculates, optimises, communicates, presents and tests ideas and concepts.

  104. John Guest says:

    Excel is lots of boxes that can talk and listen to each other !

  105. Saurabh says:

    I would say, excel is a box game, which give answers of your calculating questions, put the things in diagramatic form, as per our requirment.

  106. Dhaval says:

    Kid: What is excel?
    Me: Excel is a magic book which will solve all your math problems. 🙂
    But the only trick is to ask the right question.

  107. Narinder Kumar says:

    In Brief about Excel : - What you think, That is in Excel. 

  108. Pramod Shenoy says:

    Excel is a computer program that helps presentation of numbers / data and helps us make different kinds of calculations.

  109. Laurie says:

    Remember the story problems you had to answer in math class in school?  Well, with Exce,l you enter the story problem in equation form and Excel calculates the answer.

  110. suman poddar says:

    For the Kids,

    Excel is this huge tool box loaded with tools to resolve all sorts of mathematical problems. Like every mechanic, the choice of the tool would need to relate to the nature of the task to accomplish.

  111. Michel says:

    Excel is a magic cupboard with plenty of drawers. if I put an apple in one drawer i can decide that two apple will appear in a second drawer, and even if i know some more magic word, i can make an apple pie appear in a third drawer...And if i put an orange instead in the fisrt drawer, i can make appear a orange margelade instead of an apple pie in the third drawer.....Magic

  112. Sarah says:

    Most of the kids I know can tell me more about Excel than I know 🙂

  113. Chip says:

    Excel is a tool that helps keep track of things and summarize them in various ways. 

    For example, you could put a list of all the kids in your class into Excel. Each person would be on one row. Next to their names you could add other information. You might have whether each is a boy or a girl. You could ALSO put whether they are your friend or not. If you wanted, you could put a number on how good a friend they are. 1 means "not a close friend" and 5 means "my best friend", and people might be 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5. You could put another piece of information in there too--like "does this person answer the teacher's question correctly usually, or not?"

    After you added all this, you could summarize information by asking questions, then sorting the information to look at it (if it's a small class), or setting up formulas to calculate it (if it's a big class.) You could ask questions like:
    - How many boys are in my class?
    - How many girls named "Erica" are there in my class?
    - How many friends do I have in my class? How many close friends or best friends? How many "medium" friends?
    - How many of my friends are boys?
    - Are my friends usually people who answer the teacher's questions correctly? 

    Excel can help you answer this kind of question, and make pretty graphs of it so that other people can see your work and know the same thing you learned, but without making their own lists. We use it for business and science to answer these kinds of questions. All. Day. Long. 

  114. Ram Kumar says:

    Only tool to play with numbers. Excel makes ease for comparison, analysis, calculations with unlimited data in a single window/file. Each task can be customized based on the project or need.

  115. Stef@n says:

    Excel is fun
    Ex4fun
    🙂

  116. LloydM says:

    A bit sarcastic but;
     
    It’s a lot like a magic trick – you put something in and something else comes out and it surprising and entertaining to the children.
    It’s also like telling a story – you put in a jumble of logic, facts and reasons and out pop’s a story arch and narrative.
     
    If you know how the trick works it all makes sense and it’s not that hard to do the trick yourself.  If you know enough tricks you can combine them so it’s a new trick and even the magicians in the audience won’t know how you have done it and will keep coming back to your shows to try and figure out how you’ve done it.
     
    The best magicians use these trick to keep telling stories, and the stories have the best pictures and lots of ups and downs.  If the children are unhappy with the story then the magician can change the tricks to make everyone happy.  The children are then so happy with the story the magician told they rush off and tell their friends and the magician get asked to do shows for them.
     
    So Excel is like a magic hat.  You can put things in and make them disappear or turn into something else or you can pull something out.  Depending on the hat you can make anything happen.
     
    If you know how the hat works it’s not magic anymore – so you can learn how to work the hat or keep paying to go to the shows.
     
    By the way - the best paid magicians never reveal their secrets!!

  117. Krish says:

    Excel is a bigger calculator with lot more features and fun...!

  118. Ex-teacherlovesapplesoranges says:

    Excel is a way for you to show your friend how things around u can be sorted and counted in an easy-to-understand way! 

    If i give u an apple. It's  easy to remember.
    Now i give u a bunch of grapes. U can remember 2 items. Apple grapes. Simple. U can write that down on a notepad.

    But now i need you to help sort out apples and grapes according to their color , say U have 2 green apple 3 red apples. Then you have 2 green grapes and 4 purple grapes. 

    Suddenly there is so many things to remember.

    Well thats where excel comes in. U can write it in like your most useful buddy notepad , then it can help u remember. Even better, it can rearrange all the things u remember accordingly( like color, shape, and whatever you can think of!) to what your friend wants to see and understand!

    You can even count the apples and other fruits in excel cause it can count for you too!  

  119. Laxmanbhai says:

    Calculate anything
    Draw anything
    Graph anything
    arrange in any way
    we Engineers can't do our work without Excel

  120. [...] On 14th July, evening 4:51 PM (GMT), Chandoo.org received its 20,000th comment. 20,000! The lucky commenter was Ishav Arora, who chimed, “Like super computers…Excel is a super calculator!!!!” in our recent poll. [...]

  121. Saran says:

    I will explain like..

    Once upon a time, a spiderman is there..

    he used to answer any calculation within fraction of seconds..

    For answering he uses super calculator..

    (kid will ask then, wha is the name of the calculator..)

    that is nothing but the AWESOME EXCEL

    Regards,
    Saran
    http://www.lostinexcel.blogspot.com

  122. Miyagi says:

    Excel is a perfect world with perfect beings. All of them are named “Cell”, but just like in the human world, each has a unique and distinctive identity A1, C5 etc. They all look alike, and all are inter-twined, and inter-connected to each other. They normally live by grouping themselves into families. These families have relatives who depend on them, and relatives on whom they depend, and they use different types of Facebook named “Worksheet” again, each with their own individual identity “Worksheet 1”, “Worksheet2”, etc. to keep in constant touch with each other, and to know what’s going on in the neighbourhood. If any of their relatives changes in any way, they immediately change themselves to show that they have heard what their relative has expressed. The “Cell”’s and “Worksheet”’s  are also all completely unselfish, and freely give what they have, and freely receive what others give, although they also act as policemen to make sure that nobody indulges in illegal actions such as issuing or receiving illegal commands or instructions within the community.  All “Cell”’s and “Worksheets”’s working together in seamless harmony are governed by the Force - the highest power named “Workbook” which makes sure that all Excel beings are safe within this perfect world, and do not stray outside into the imperfect human world outside!
     
    Excel is truly the most perfect of perfect worlds.

  123. Anand says:

    Excel is book were you can calculate how many chocolates your Dad has given so far and ask for more 🙂

  124. Tyler says:

    Excel is like a bunch of blocks of information.  You can arrange these blocks in many different ways and use math to calculate different things about the blocks.  It is a very cool toy!!

  125. dan l says:

    how santa clause tracks which kids ask too many questions......

  126. Paul says:

    Electronic LEGOs for grownups.  You can build anything you want in any color shape you want!

  127. Repath says:

    Hi Team,

    I would explain that EXCEL IS NUMBER CIRCUS... and not just EXHIBITION.

    With Regards
    Repath.

  128. Becky says:

    My 4 year all knows that I do "big numbers" at work and I guess that I could start by telling her that Excel helps me make sense of the big numbers.  However, I know that whatever I tell her will be followed up by a million questions from her, most of which will begin with "why".  I think that I might just put her in front of Excel instead of Word next time we play.

  129. Govind says:

    I am civil Engineer. and It is a fact that due to excel  estimate preparation made easy. 

  130. Mahesh says:

    You know what lovely, Think of it as a kitchen, not your moms kitchen but a magicians kitchen. It is a large cabinet to store all the stuff and then cook up things. Just one thing!  "this magician is a crank" and can talk only in maths. like he will say "add the milk and the sugar and the strawberys, fill it in a glass and bring it to me" you see this crank cant make out that "you dont add milk and sugar and strawberrys" to get a milk shake. Well he is cranky but he is gooooooood ad maths and thats what excel is. It make such stories to explain small children.

  131. Barcetta says:

    I am missing this:
    With Excel you can load big chunks of data, then filter, sort and combine them until you get a nice and meaningful overview.

  132. MF says:

    Excel is a fun toy for many adults; while it's a nightmare for the rest of adults who don't see fun in it... 🙂

  133. Des Howell says:

    Spreadsheets are software that can be used in basically three ways: (a) like a piece of grid paper,e.g. recording information as a table of facts and figures (b) like a hand-held calculator, e.g. typing in =23*4 gives you 92 and (c) like a simple programming language.
    (c) (using the results of one calculation in other calculations to produce a string of calculations) is the hardest to explain simply in words, it needs to be demonstrated. e.g find the average of several numbers by adding them and then dividing by the count of the numbers. Then change some of the input numbers to show how the spreadsheet does a recalculation. Compare this, if you like, with doing the same thing in BASIC. It will look very similar.

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