Responses to discussion

Excel is an easy to use spreadsheet package included in Microsoft Office package. From storing data to various mathematical calculations and programming capabilities, Excel stands out more than any other spreadsheet packages in the market for many years. It incorporates many powerful financial, statistical, mathematical, and other functions and can execute model solution tasks such as linear programming and regression analysis (Sharda et al., 2020, p. 474). Various add-ons can be added that can be used to structure and solve specific model classes. Many addons are developed for DSS development such as Solver and Whats’sBest for performing linear and nonlinear optimization, NeuralTools for artificial neural network, Evolver for genetic algorithms and @RISK for performing simulation studies (Sharda et al., 2020, p. 473). IT has been a one stop shop for all the tools required to perform advanced business calculations across various industries. For instance, Solver addon can be used to for What-if analysis and is used to find an optimal value for a formula in a cell. Excel is the most pervasive, all-purpose, and one-stop modeling tool due to its ease of use and resides in Microsoft Office suite which continues to grow as each new version is introduced (Guerrero, 2019, p. 4). It also provides seamless integrations with other databases and can be programmed using Macros and Visual Basic for Applications to manipulate the content in the sheet. These enhanced capabilities help enrich the efficiency of building DSS.

References

Guerrero, H. (2019). Excel data analysis (p. 4). Springer Berlin Heidelberg.

Sharda, R., Delen, D., Turban, E. (2020). Prescriptive Analysis. Analytics, data science, &

artificial intelligence: Systems for decision support (pp. 418-423). NJ, Pearson.

References

Sharda, R., Delen, D., Turban, E. (2020). Deep learning. Analytics, data science, & artificial

intelligence: Systems for decision support (pp. 418-423). NJ, Pearson.

Shahnawaz and Astya, P. "Sentiment analysis: Approaches and open issues," 2017 International

Conference on Computing, Communication and Automation (ICCCA), Greater Noida,

2017, pp. 154-158, doi: 10.1109/CCAA.2017.8229791.