If you were to hire for just about any position and sifted through dozens of resumes, the one constant on nearly everyone would be “Microsoft Excel” under the skills section. More than 750 million people worldwide use Excel, and it has become a prerequisite for just about any job in any industry these days. But there’s a massive range of fluency in Excel, and just because you know how to make a spreadsheet does not mean you know how to use this powerful program.
The truth is, Excel can do a lot more than you probably realize, including acting as a treasured addition to your business intelligence operations.
Microsoft Excel was released in 1985 and has grown to become arguably the most critical computer program in workplaces worldwide. In business, any function in any industry can benefit from those with strong Excel knowledge. As a result, excel is a powerful tool that has become entrenched in business processes worldwide—whether for analyzing stocks or issuers, budgeting, or organizing client sales lists.
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Using Excel for business tasks saves time and money thanks to the numerous options for storing and analyzing data and features that allow you to automate repetitive daily tasks. For example, Microsoft Excel spreadsheets software comes with million rows of data and automates number crunching, but this popular spreadsheet software can do more than just figures.
Top 10 Uses of Microsoft Excel that can improve your business
The list of ways that business uses MS Excel is long. But we’ve’ broken it down to a top 10 list. At a basic level, MS Excel is used for storing information, analysianalyzingrting, and reporting. It’s’ trendy in business because spreadsheets are highly visual and relatively easy to use.
Some of the most common business uses of MS Excel are for business analysis, managing human resources, performance reporting, and operations management. We know this for a fact after analyzing job data (using MS Excel).
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Business Analysis
The number 1 use of MS Excel in the workplace is to do business analysis. Business analysis is essentially using collected data to inform decision-making. Businesses naturally gather data in their day-to-day activities, such as product sales, website traffic, spending on supplies, insurance claims, etc.
Business analysis is the activity of converting data into something valuable to the people who run the business. For example, you could run a profitability report by the day of the week. If the company always loses money on a Sunday, management could use the information to decide (such as closing on Sundays).
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People Management
You may be surprised to learn that one of the top uses of Excel in business is to manage people. MS Excel is a powerful way to organize information about people, whether employees, customers, supporters, or training attendees.
Using Excel, personal information can be stored and retrieved efficiently. For example, a spreadsheet row or column can be used for an individual record, including information like name, email address, employee start date, items purchased, subscription status, and last contact.
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Managing Operations
Excel is relied on heavily to manage the day-to-day operations of many businesses.
Business activities can often involve quite complicated logistics. Inventory flows need to be controlled so that you can keep operations running smoothly – and without overstocking on particular items. That means keeping track of supplier and client transactions, listing critical dates, and managing times and schedules.
While Amazon uses sophisticated custom software for operations management, MS Excel is essential for many smaller businesses (or parts of larger companies). An advantage of Excel is that it’s’ relatively low tech, allowing it to be used by many people and without the risk of programming bugs.
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Performance Reporting
Performance monitoring and reporting is a specialized business analysis that can be done effectively using MS Excel. For example, many accountants still use Excel (partly because it’s’ compatible with cloud-based accounting software).
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A common way to convert data into a performance report in Excel is to create a pivot table. By inserting a pivot table and linking it to data, you can quickly get extra helpful information from the dataset. In addition, pivot tables have numerous in-built functions that allow for tasks such as counting and summing certain types of data within the dataset.
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Office Administration
Office administrators use Excel to enter and store much of the data that’s subsequently used for accounting and financial reporting, as well as business analysis and performance reporting.
Apart from recordkeeping, Excel is useful in office administration for supporting day-to-day tasks such as invoicing, paying bills, and contacting suppliers and clients. Thus, it’s an all-purpose tool for keeping track of and managing office activities.
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Using Excel for Managing Product Information
If you’re’ running an eCommerce business, you know how vital maintaining accurate and up-to-date product information is in generating online sales, reducing returns, and winning repeat business.
You can use a range of Excel features to drill into your data and optimize your product information to fuel eCommerce growth.
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Project Management
Although project managers have access to purpose-built project management (BPM) software, an Excel Workbook is often an effective alternative.
Projects are business activities that typically have a budget and start and end dates. Project plans can be placed into a workbook, which can then track progress and keep the project on schedule.
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An advantage of using Excel is that you can easily share the project workbook with others, including unfamiliar people who lack access to custom BPM software.
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Managing Programs
Excel is a good platform for managing programs. It can be adapted to handle the specific characteristics of a given program. And, because MS Excel is widely known, program records can easily be managed by multiple people and, when the time comes, handed over to a new manager.
A program is like a project but maybe ongoing and can depend on participation by users. MS Excel helps managers allocate resources, keep track of progress, and maintain participant records.
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Sales Reporting In Excel
Excel, in particular, is one of the best tools you can use to track and report on sales for your business. With its capability for dashboard creation, automated reports, and integration into other business systems, Excel sales reports bring all your critical sales insights into one easy-to-use sheet that can be read by anyone and shared across the business to communicate and track performance.
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Account Management
Account managers are generally required to be competent MS Excel users since they receive and maintain customer records. Ninety, In addition, percent of companies use Excel for budgeting, planning, and forecasting operations. As a result, excel is the go-to solution for businesses when it comes to accounting software.
Excel is commonly used in account management since it provides a simple way to share and maintain client files.
Why You Need Excel Skills in your Business
MS Excel skills are instrumental in business management. Not all jobs use Excel, and those that do are often considered “middle skill “jobs. However, Excel is widely used. Middle-skill spreadsheet skills, therefore, give you the ability to work on all sorts of different tasks. And you can more easily get value out of information that’s being shared in workbooks.
Once you know how to use Excel, you’ll find yourself using it more and more. It’s’ an accessible platform that can be used to do both simple and highly sophisticated business tasks.
