I have a confession – I am starting to like Microsoft Excel

After three years of my high-flying London friends telling me that Microsoft Excel is “amazing” because it can “crunch numbers” so much faster than anything else, making work a lot more efficient, accurate and accessible, I think I’m starting to believe them (and I hate admitting that I’m wrong.)

As you may have gathered from previous posts, I am a self-confessed techno phobe (which was evident again the other day when the mic I used on an interviewee had run out of battery and I had a mini stress), so being told I’d be using Microsoft Excel all day every day when I started at Arcadia was hardly music to my ears.

I spent a lot of time at work doing love charts instead of developing my excel skills

After a fortnight of inputting data in Excel and making it look pretty with different coloured fonts, fills, borders and font styles, I was instructed to perform a vlookup. “A what?” I said, greatly bemused. Let’s just say it was probably the best thing I learnt in my first month there – not just because of it’s funky name and because I could actually make the function work (a miracle), but because it made my job of searching through 400+ stores’ sales and stock information a doddle. And anything that made work a doddle had to be a good thing.

But my senior at the time, and my now good friend Sarah, dismissed the vlookups power, referring to it as “The poor man’s sumif.” And so she directed me towards the slightly more advanced function of the sumif; another handy way of collating data and relaying it back in a readable form (and probably a bit more reliable than the vlookup because if you insert extra columns, it takes note of this and changes the data accordingly – get me!)

So, when our lecturer Glyn told us that Microsoft Excel was a useful tool in making investigative journalism easier and more accessible, it fondly brought back memories of the software I had initially resented (my resentment wasn’t all Excel’s fault, I generally hate anything to do with numbers and computers – apart from Microsoft Word – love that.)

Admittedly, knowing how to perform a sumif, vlookup and how to sort data by a filter probably won’t help me unearth major stories based on government spending, but I feel it’s a good start.

Glyn told us that Computer Assisted Reporting (CAR), which refers to the tools and techniques that help you think up story ideas and research investigative stories, is a form of journalism which is still relatively new in the UK. It originally developed from journalists using tools used by social scientists and spreadsheets and database managers.  The tools include; email, internet browsers, search engines, spreadsheets and databases and will assist you in developing, evaluating and analysing data effectively; taking you a step closer to getting that elusive scoop that every journalist dreams about.

Lucky for us, there are public bodies available online with lots of government information such as the Electoral Commission and you can apply for membership to UK Government Data. These sources will provide figures on interesting topics which journalists can apply CAR to and hopefully uncover something of interest. 

I like the thought of detective work and achieving a scoop out if it, but I’m not so keen on the idea of working with numbers. Hopefully my high-flying London friends can brush up my excel skills before I enter the world of work again – and yes, that is me requesting lessons in excel. My old boss would be proud.

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