Microsoft Excel is a well-known spreadsheet software that provides powerful tools one can use to systematize, analyze, visualize, share, and manage information to make more informed decisions or conclusions that are better grounded by data. The aim of this review is not to introduce the newest features of the latest version of the software released in 2007 but to share some experiences of how Excel and potentially also other available spreadsheet software packages could be fruitfully utilized within the context of mixed methods studies.

Whereas professional ‘‘quantitative’’researchers prefer statistical packages like SPSS or SAS for data analysis and ‘‘qualitative’’researchers look for special software like Atlas. ti or NVivo, MS Excel is quite widely used for quantitative data analysis as it is both readily available and familiar from school or a basic computer course. However, Excel has lots of features that make the handling and integration of different types of data very flexible, giving it potential to be used within a mixed approach more beneficially than as just a poor substitute for a statistical package. First, MS Excel’s compartmentalized worksheet provides a flexible structure for recording both notes and keywords from unstructured raw data, for example, in the course of a meta-analysis of literature or published studies. Memos can be attached to the cells using the Insert Comment tool. This combination of structure with flexibility makes composing summary tables, where the structure is not clear in the beginning of the process but