This week's content dealt with Microsoft Excel and how to use it. I thought this was a very value-adding activity to have in a course. However, as I am just an exchange student and I have to use MS Excel from the first day of my academic career on (which now dates back to 2007), I knew all the presented features of MS Excel that were presented in the lectures already. Regardless of this fact, I found a "refreshment" of my MS Excel skills a very nice thing to do.
A concept that I already used at my home university many times is that of the "Pivot Table". A Pivot Table is basically a tool that eases looking up data by making it possible to summarize desired information and then display it more clearly on a separate sheet (which is then the Pivot Table). Amongst other things, you can sort, total, and count the data in your "raw data" sheet. Its ability to simply drag and drop different data fields into the Pivot Table is what gave the Pivot Table its name. This tool is very helpful as you can extract the data relevant to you from a large set of raw data and see different relations more quickly (i.e. you could tell Excel to determine how many Females or Males respectively have bought a certain amount of a special product in the last year).
I think the concept of Pivot Tables is a very important one in today's business environment as the ability to create these tables will ease the interpretation of huge data sheets significantly.
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