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I had managed to get through most of my career as a software engineer without having to touch Microsoft Excel. My only encounters with this flagship product from MS was on the rare occasions that I actually did some business traveling and would then use an Excel template to compute my travel expenses.

It wasn’t until my last job position that I finally began to uncover the true power of Excel.

The last company I worked for was involved in the manufacture of scanners for the cell phone industry. This involved a lot of digital signal processing (DSP) and RF technology, which to an applications developer like myself is black magic. On one occasion I was working alongside a DSP engineer and we needed to calculate the period of a signal. This is just a simple division operation and I began to pull up the trusty calculator tool in Windows, but the other engineer said “No, No” and pulled up an open Excel spreadsheet and quickly punched the formula into an empty cell in the spreadsheet.

It seemed like 6 of 1 and a half dozen of the other at the time, but it occurred to me then that “you can put your formulas in there” (reference to an old Adam Sandler bit from “Saturday Night Live”).

As you can clearly see, I was less than just an Excel Dummy — I was an Excel Total Freaking Moron!

So I slowly began to incorporate Excel a little bit at a time into my work. Like it’s siblings in the MS Office Suite such as MS Word and PPT, I was only scratching the surface when it came to using all its features.

Around the same time I was just getting started with IM. It was also around this time that I began seeing how others in the IM world were using Excel. Most of the IM applications I saw were ROI calculators and earnings spreadsheets of various sorts.

One thing that caught my eye was how people really dressed up their Excel spreadsheets with shadings and fancy font stylings. I was still struggling with setting up formulas.

The other very neat usage of Excel that I later discovered was how it could be enlisted to format and wrap keywords and destination URLs for pasting into Adwords. This introduced me to the wonderful world of Excel functions such as CONCATENATE.

I also came to find that there are a few rudimentary logical functions. This opened up the possibility for implementing some very simple algorithms into the spreadsheet.

I still have a long way to go before I can reach the Advanced Dummy stage, but I’ve noticed the ability to use Excel to prototype simple software applications and functions. Granted, this usage of Excel is extremely limited, but it’s already proven useful for a few of my PHP scripts — code up a formula in Excel and then translate it to PHP.

Turns out there are calculators and then there’s Excel.