Excel Project

For the Excel project, my job as a worker at a fitness center was to see if their workout program was effective. I created formulas in order to measure the 500 participants in a 20 minute exercise. Maximum Heart Rate, Target Heart Rate, Highest Heart Rate, Percentage Increase and whether the subject’s target was achieved were all measured in the raw data spreadsheet. The spreadsheet measured for fifteen minutes of exercise with one minute intervals. I also had to setup the print layout, create pivot tables and set freeze panes so that you could see the first two rows throughtout the spreadsheet when printed.

During my current internship, I often use Excel to measure the results of surveys I give out to specific fitness classes at the Southwest Recreation Center so this project was very helpful to me. I wasn’t aware of the pivot table function and really only knew the basics of Excel. I hadn’t used the PEMDAS order of operations since middle school but I did remember what it stood for and how to do it. I found absolute cell addressing to be most useful because it could be used by all the data in the project since the owner didn’t know which percentage she wanted to use. It took some time to find the highest value in a range of cells and implement it into the raw data. The IF function was also very beneficial to me so I could set boundaries to determine whether the subject did or did not reach their target level.

I expected the pivot tables to be most confusing and to take a while to figure out. However, the instructions were very clear and I didn’t have much of a problem adding the two pivot tables to the project. In the first pivot table, I answered the question “How many subjects reached their target heart rate during the 15 minute exercise window?” I did this by using Yes, No and the Grand Total as columns to go along with rows for Male, Female, and Grand Total. Now I could see which participants reached their target level during the exercise. For the second pivot table, I determined the average percent increase in heart rate for the subjects grouped by decade and gender. Gender was included in the columns and age in the rows. I am glad I got an opportunity to use more advanced Excel skills in this project and look forward to using them in school and my career.