Excel Project

Exercise study

Hello everybody,

Today I will tell you something about an interesting Excel project that I worked on. I analyzed data that I received from a large fitness center containing the heart rates of 500 individuals doing a particular workout. The fitness center was interested in how well the workout is designed and how many of the subjects achieved their individually determined target heart rate. My job now was to analyze the raw data.

The raw data contained the age and gender of each subject as well as the individual starting heart rates, the heart rates of each minute in a 15 minute workout, and the heart rates of each minute in a five minute cooldown period after the workout. Afterwards I added a column and calculated the maximum heart rate for each subject which is defined as being 220 minus a subject’s age. Further, I added a column calculating the target heart rate which was in this case 80 per cent of the maximum heart rate. Subsequently I added several columns calculating the highest heart rate achieved for each subject, whether or not the subject reached the target heart rate and the percentage increase of the heart rate during the workout. In addition to that I also formatted the worksheet according to the specifications of the fitness center.

Finally I did some data analysis using two pivot tables. These tables made it very easy for me to display on a separate worksheet some statistics about the raw data. The first one shows how many subjects reached their target heart rate and also divides them by gender. The second pivot table shows the average increase of the heart rate of subjects divided by gender and by age. The especially useful aspect of pivot tables is that I could easily configure the division by age to show age-decade groups, firstly from 20-29, secondly from 30-39 and finally from 40-49 in just one simple step using the “Group…” function. Picture 1 shows a screenshot of my average increase pivot table in Excel 2010.

 Picture 1: Screenshot pivot table 2 (Source: screenshot of my laptop's screen)

In conclusion I can say that this project combined with the video lectures of this were really practical and useful. I already considered my level of knowledge in Excel to be advanced so most of the things that were taught were not new to me but the pivot table section deepened my knowledge of this subject and I feel more secure about using them now.