June 10, 2021

Siteg, Kyryll Mae M.

BSFra 3

Reaction Paper
Using Excel and Excel VBA for Preliminary Analysis in Big Data Research

Paul Blayney and Zhaohao Sun paper Using Excel and Excel VBA for Preliminary
Analysis in Big Data Research (2019) is a research about where and how to utilize spreadsheet
software to do big data research, and how utilized excel be with other soft wares and analytical
approaches in big data research. The researchers separately discuss on how to use excel and
programming with Visual Basic for Application (VBA) labelling section one and two. For
section one they tackled that spreadsheet models combined processing and output components
that cause it to be criticised by traditional programmers. They also mentioned the problem of
hard coding values, the formulas tab in the Excel’s function library, the concept and importance
of modularisation, and discussions about the IF function, excel statistical function, the excel
data filters, and the power pivot. The section two which is about excel VBA, the researchers
highlight the difference between excel and excel VBA and discuss how to utilized excel VBA
and how it will work.

I have been familiar with excel and excel Visual Basic for Application (VBA) is very
new to me. In my previous subjects our professors introduce to us how to use excel functions
in solving and analysing asset management. I definitely agree on this statement “Virtually
every successful spreadsheet application uses formulas. In fact, constructing formulas can
certainly be construed as a type of “programming”. (Walkenbach, 2002, p. 37)” for a reason
that spreadsheet or excel has many functions that can be used in solving quickly the sum, count,
average, ratios, etc. just by inputting specific values and formulas in a particular order and as
an accountant student it was taught to us that constructing formulas in excel can be used as an
accounting tool in preparing financial statements such as balance sheets, income statements,
cash flows and shareholders’ equity and specially in creating and preparing a payroll system.
Next, my thoughts about excel statistical function is one of the most commonly used function
in spreadsheet because it is used in big data analysis both in a quantitative and qualitative
research by solving and giving the accurate mean, median, variances, standard deviation based
on the data gathered. My thought about the art of programming with excel VBA is that it has a
huge difference with excel and just by mastering some basic VBA techniques it can increase
the amount exponentially of analysing big data. In the getting started with excel VBA it only
proves the huge difference between them because excel VBA has additional features that excel
don’t have and it can easily analyse those big data. One strength of VBA is creating a macros,
these macros are programming codes that could facilitate to speed up the analysis and give
accurate data if correct datas are added to the program.

My final thought about this research paper is that excel or spreadsheets are commonly
used for PCs and laptop and also commonly used by accountants specially that one of their
specialization is bookkeeping. Excels with or without programming are used to do basic data
analysis to see if it is a reasonable alternative to a statistical package in the same case and one
of the strength of excel is it quickly and easily manipulate rows and columns prior to statistical
analysis. Lastly, using excel VBA is better in automating task and performing more complex
task that would take longer and more resources are needed to complete.