The MS Excel Importance in Business Today
The MS Excel spreadsheet software is perfect tool to manage many business operations and analyzing data. With Excel, you can organize your data, make financial analyses on your business, efficiently manage your employees, and automate daily tasks. Let’s dive into all the advantages that you can take from Excel.
Data Organization
Microsoft Excel is the best way to store and organize raw data. It eases the job of administrators that have to deal with a million rows of variables in their database systems and need to update them regularly.
They can use Excel tables to track the growth of single and combined statistics like report trends and product complexities.
Graphs
Microsoft Excel improves over other graphing programs on data visualization, thanks to charts and their malleable graphs.
It presents you with your data, and you can insert new or modify the existing data with a single click.
Business and Strategic Analysis
The daily workload will gather business data naturally, which could be on product sales, expenses, etc. With MS Excel, you can track all these operations to have a bigger picture of your business.
It will help your marketing department as they will rely not only on financial research but also on Excel spreadsheets to track sales trends and customer behavior.
Customer and Sales Data Management
Many small business establishments keep track of their customers’ and clients’ information on a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet.
This customer database facilitates their job when they need to contact them, and if you need to modify or introduce more data, there would be no problem as it will not override the previous one.
It is also very useful in tracking product sales. Keeping a record is vital for small business owners to check their performance and identify any low sales trends that may happen in the company. Then, by using some regression analysis, you can plan new ways to attract customers and sales targets.
Financial Accounting
People working in a finance or accounting department are mostly required to have some knowledge about using Excel, as they receive and maintain customer data and records.
The account manager is a key role in nurturing relationships with any existing client as they work on getting their loyalty.
The MS Excel software also helps us to track our ROI (Return On Investment). It allows the business owner to compare how much they invested and their earnings. With a close eye on the data analytics, it will be able to estimate how long it will take to break even or start to profit.
Human Resource Planning
Microsoft Excel allows the Human Resources department to keep track of the employees. They can efficiently retrieve employee data on any person, summarize expenses and hours by pay period, and understand how the workforce is distributed based on their functions or pay level.
Most Human Resources departments use database systems like Oracle or SAP to handle payroll. Still, Excel allows us to import data to a spreadsheet and amplify the information that we can gather.
Work Scheduling and Performance Report
A Manager can use the scheduling tool in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet application to assign work tasks to their team members. If the manager conducts it well, there will be no issues in delivering different projects to their clients in time and not falling behind on their project deadlines.
These tasks can be color-coded and are built in such a way that they will automatically update whenever the schedule of activities might change.
They can also monitor performance through Excel and make performance reports thanks to the Pivot Tables, another powerful tool from the Microsoft spreadsheet program. A Pivot Table has numerous built-in functions that allow linking, counting, and summing certain data types within the dataset.
And if you need to present it on paper, Excel allows you to print it with lots of customization where you can change the margin, paper size, orientation, and more.
Increase Employee Value
One goal of the Human Resources department is employee retention. And one should consider giving them training to improve their Excel skills, as “employee satisfaction” is closely related to the amount of training we can provide them.
With more people knowing how to use Excel, it will boost efficiency, job speed, and production.
Increase your Personnel Value
Anyone should consider learning Excel, as it benefits not only business owners but also employees.
It will increase your visibility if you are looking for a new job. Research published by Wall Street Journal in 2015 shows that a middle-skilled job that requires the use of Microsoft Excel and no other “digital skill” could pay $22.66 an hour against $20.14 from jobs that doesn’t require any digital skill. It can open your way to a better job with a bigger salary.
Automate Tasks when Handling Small and Big Data
Automating tasks and repetitive business operations is another of the powerful Microsoft Excel tools.
Companies can use Excel Automation to save time and enhance productivity thanks to using the VBA (Visual Basic for Applications).
VBA is the coding language for Microsoft Office and allows you to write lines of code for almost all activities that you can perform on Excel, from basic tasks to more complex functions like Pivot Tables.
This is perfect for tying in with managing large amounts of data. Even more on small and local data, as they are crucial in the first steps of growing as a company.
Good handling of data will lead to good decision-making and conclusions to lead your company on a profitable path. But, of course, as it grows, it will also need to improve on the “Excel game.”
Transforming and Cleaning Data
Working with a lot of data would lead to situations where you need to deal with messy data, which you need to clean before using it. Unfortunately, this process of cleaning and transforming big amounts of data can take a lot of your time and, overall, is a tedious process.
Microsoft has introduced in Excel the Power Query, which transforms the data and cleans the engine well so you can load data from multiple sources, transform it and then load it back to your worksheet.
Programming
Microsoft Excel is almost compatible with most programming languages used to create macros.
This makes it easier to solve complex functions and enhances programming efficiency.
Most businesses are required to keep track of any project, products, and operations that are running, and people capable of generating Excel macros are regarded as assets to the company.
Worldwide Use of Microsoft Excel
Having good skills in using Microsoft Excel allows you to work on all sorts of different tasks.
Excel is not only lots of information on spreadsheets. It is an important data analysis tool that has become the most used spreadsheet program.
Once you start with Excel, you will find yourself using it more for work purposes and even personal data organisation. You can expand it from doing basic tasks to creating charts, making complex calculations, or writing formulas.
It Doesn’t Require Advanced Excel Skills to Make Profits
You won’t need to be an IT expert to learn Excel. Better knowledge, of course, would be better for your business. But even with some intermediate skills, you will be fine in most middle-skilled jobs. The better your expertise is, the better you will be.
In Conclusion:
Microsoft Excel is the best tool for your business. It is the easiest to learn all around. It requires you to buy a Key for its activation, but it is a good investment to do, not only for a company but for personal purposes, as learning Excel could lead to many other open doors and opportunities.
It can easily manage large amounts of data, perform formula-based arithmetic, which is perfect for students to learn, deal with basic accounting and more advanced functions.
Overall, it saves time for a lot of businesses and their personnel. You will manage and analyze data organization issues with Excel, take care of customer and sales targets, represent statistical data, and keep track of your operations.