Excel Project

The Excel project puts you in the shoes of a large fitness center's employee who has to do analyses on data from 500 clients.  The employee must determine the effectiveness of a particular workout.  The data ranges from age and gender, to maximum heart rate, and targeted heart rate.  The owner of the fitness center wants the spreadsheet returned promptly.  After I completed this project I would be able to deal with a situation similar to this, in a very efficient and timely manner. My proficiency in Excel and this project allowed me to present data in an effective manner without displaying all the raw data.

If some people are not familiar with Excel; the formula bar creates a time saving function. The function allows you to enter a formula for one problem, and Excel has the ability to perform the same formula to additional cells/rows you want included. So instead of finding the answer for all 500 clients, a simple formula inserted in the formula bar inputs a set equation, and plugs in the different numbers for each cell/row to create its own unique answer. One of the formulas asked was Maximum Heart rate, which would be written as (220 - the age of the subject).  Another formula was the percent increase heart rate formula which was written (Highest heart rate - Start heart rate)/start heart rate.  If not for the formula input ability it would have taken hours to find the maximum and increased heart rate for every client.

An interesting feature in Excel that I was unaware of, is the Pivot Table function. This function allows you to aggregate your data and display in a table a number of options.  Such as the percent of people above 25 or how many reached their target heart rate. The Pivot Table then allows the user to format the analysis in an attractive table for easy presenting and understanding. I will certainly be using the Pivot Table function in future projects with Excel, as it is very simple and easy to understand. The Below screen shot is of my Pivot Table I did for my project. It was for finding the demographic group that most benefited from the exercise workout by looking at the percent of each demographic that reached their target heart rate.