Microsoft Excel has between 750 million and 1.2 billion monthly paying subscribers. You could say that this makes Excel an application with a pretty solid place in the business world. It is not only a basic spreadsheet application anymore. Excel has gone far beyond that, with various add-on features like statistical analyses.
The Top 10 Business Applications of Excel
If you work in any kind of business, chances are you will use it at some point in your career. But many regular users like you don’t even realize what they have at their fingertips.
In the grand scheme of things, Excel is not an easy program to use. But, it can do a lot more than just crunch numbers. It is a valuable business tool in its own right. So, get ready to spend your next few minutes learning about the power of Excel.
What Makes Excel a Good Application?
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet made up of individual cells in rows and columns. It functions as a database. You can use Excel to do complex operations. It allows you to seamlessly analyze and interpret large datasets with functions and formulas.
Most professionals fail to use this powerful business application in their practice. In fact, 1 in 8 people asks colleagues for help with Excel. But if you’re all caught up and ready to go, Excel training courses may be the next step. Getting hands-on experience is the best way to master Excel functions.
Indeed, Excel is the single most underutilized tool out there for business applications. You should try out different tools and develop new skills as well. This will result in developing a deeper, more refined understanding of all of Excel’s capabilities.
How Can You Use Excel in Your Day-to-Day Business Operations?
While Excel has helped people in a personal sense, businesses are no strangers to the software. What is even more impressive is the various ways they are benefiting from Excel. This software is a great tool for enhancing your business’s productivity. Here are 10 ways you can harness the power of Excel in the workplace:
Business Analysis
Business analysis is the use of data collected to support a decision process. Various statistical trends using Excel are also helpful for businesses. Businesses collect data in the course of their daily operations. These include information on product revenues, user engagements, and so on.
Excel is indispensable in business analysis and planning. Business analysts convert data into knowledge findings. The valuable insights help businesses make strategic decisions.
Accounting
Accountants prefer MS Excel because it is complementary to accounting software. Spreadsheet programs carry out accounting operations. You can use Excel for quality monitoring and reporting.
Excel can help you create balance sheets, prepare financial statements, and set budgets. You can also use it to track expenses, forecast, and calculate loans. Excel has a variety of spreadsheet templates available to develop tables and diagrams. This can help businesses check their business’s course over time.
Operation Management
Management of business operations includes both strategic and day-to-day processing of products. It all starts with product design and ends with logistics. Consider inventory tracking. Businesses can use Excel to control their supply chain and keep operations running smoothly.
But, inventory management in Excel needs a great deal of manual intervention. So it is usually a victim of human error, unlike other expensive alternatives. While that is the case, Excel for inventory management is the best solution for startups or small businesses. It is a dependable and cost-effective option for starting a business.
HR Management
Excel is a fantastic tool for HR professionals. Human resources is a broad field with a diverse range of duties. The employees who work in human resources have a lot on their plates. Their daily tasks range from recruitment to communicating business benefits packages.
With so much to take into account, HR managers must remain organized. Excel can be very useful in this process. It can give HR executives a way to organize employee work calendars, track vacation days, and more.
Compiling Mailing and Contact Lists
Excel’s applications include an excellent system to collect and keep account information. It can support and filter large volumes of that type of data. If you want to run a tailored mass email blast, you can use an Excel feature called Mail Merge. This helps you to personalize email campaigns for different clients in your spreadsheet.
Office Administration
Excel is a multi-purpose tool for organizing and monitoring office functions. Office admin staff use Microsoft Excel to input and file critical data sets. It is beneficial in office administration for sustaining day-to-day activities. This includes recordkeeping, bill payments, and notifying suppliers.
Project Management
An Excel workbook is a viable alternative to any project management (PM) software. Projects are business dealings with a budget and a pre-defined date. You can enter project plans into a workbook.
One feature of using Excel is that it is simple to share the project workbook with others. This includes those who do not have access to high-end PM software. By doing so, you can track the process to keep things running smoothly.
Data Visualizations
Data visualization helps communicate the findings of your data analysis. You can present in a concise, accessible, and compelling manner.
Plots and graphs have a way of summarizing data in a way that makes sense to your coworkers. They can easily understand a set of data if you put it in a plot or graph. Excel converts confusing pages of raw data into engaging, interactive, and easy-to-understand graphs.
Contract Administration
Contract administrators also leverage Microsoft Excel. They use it to manage and track their contracts.
There are a variety of contract management templates to choose from. You can tailor these templates to the specific contract type. This makes it simple to document contract details like dates, deliverables, and fees.
Performance Reporting
You can do performance monitoring and reporting with MS Excel. The pivot table in Excel provides many benefits for generating performance reports.
You can also extract valuable insights from a dataset by inserting a pivot table and linking it to the data. Pivot tables include built-in functions for counting and summing data within the dataset.
How to Get Excel Skills?
You have a lot of choices when it comes to spreadsheets. And, there’s one option that stands out above all the rest: MS Excel. But it is not just a tool for basic business functions. Excel is a versatile platform, with value across an array of business functions.
If you’re looking for a way to make your work life easier, Excel is a great tool to have. A workforce with enough knowledge of spreadsheets leads to a successful business. With this in mind, Excel skills can help you get better work opportunities.
All-in-all, it’s good to go out and get yourself into some Excel training courses. This also allows you to both gain more responsibility and earn more money. Soon enough, you will be looking at solutions to business problems with a fresh perspective. This way, the company can stay one step ahead of the competition.
