Excel, like other spreadsheets, is used by reporters and scholars to make the same computations over and over again on a whole bunch of numbers.

They let you sort small lists in different ways, produce lists for publication, clean up files you find on the Internet and organize virtually anything that comes in list form, including notes and chronologies.

Some folks bristle at typing in, say, 30 numbers into a spreadsheet.  You shouldn't.  The reason is that if you want to calculate the numbers by hand, you'll end up typing them into a calculator far more times.

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