Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) Excel was launched in 1985 and has become arguably the most important computer program in the workplace worldwide. When you need content management software, you usually use Excel. In the business world, literally every function in every industry can benefit from those with a good knowledge of Excel. Excel is a powerful tool that has found its way into business processes around the world, whether it’s analyzing stocks or issuers, preparing a budget, or organizing client sales lists.
finance and accounting
Financial services and financial accounting are the areas of finance that rely on Excel spreadsheets and benefit the most from them. In the 1970s and early 1980s, financial analysts spent weeks running advanced formulas, either manually or in programs like IBM’s Lotus 1-2-3 (NYSE: IBM). Today, you can use Excel to perform complex modeling in minutes.
When you walk through the finance or accounting department of a large company, you see computer screens full of Excel spreadsheets summarizing numbers, presenting financial results, and creating budgets, forecasts, and reports to make important business decisions.
BEGINNING
Most people know that Excel can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but it can do a lot more with advanced IF functions when combined with VLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH-MATCH, and PivotTables. (See the Investopedia Guide to Excel for Finance: PV and FV Functions for more information).
Marketing and Product Management
While marketing and product professionals turn to their finance teams to do the heavy lifting of financial analysis, using spreadsheets to list customers and sales targets can help you manage your sales force and plan your future marketing strategies based on past results .
A pivot table allows users to quickly and easily summarize customer and sales data by category using drag-and-drop.
workforce planning
While database systems like oracle (ORCL), JUICE (SAP) etc Quickbooks (INTU) can be used to manage salary and employee information. By exporting this data to Excel, users can see trends, summarize spend and hours by pay period, month or year, and better understand how your workforce is distributed by function or compensation level.
HR professionals can use Excel to take a huge spreadsheet full of employee data and understand exactly where costs are coming from and how best to plan and control them going forward.
You can do anything with a spreadsheet
There are almost no limits to the use of Excel for Business for applications. Here are some examples :
- If you are planning a team outing for a baseball game, you can use Excel to track the RSVP list and costs.
- Excel creates sales growth models for new products based on new customer forecasts.
- When planning the editorial calendar of a website, you can enter dates and topics in a table.
- When budgeting for a small product, you can list the spend categories in a spreadsheet, update monthly, and create a chart that shows how close the product is to budget in each category.
- You can calculate customer discounts based on monthly purchase volume per product.
- Users can aggregate customer sales by product to find areas where they can build stronger customer relationships.
- Use complex calculation methods, such as B. Sharpe ratios.
Excel isn’t going anywhere
Excel isn’t going anywhere, and businesses will continue to use it as their primary tool for various functions and applications ranging from IT projects to company picnics.
A working knowledge of Excel is essential for most office workers today, and improved Excel skills can open the door to promotion and leadership opportunities. Excel is a powerful tool, but it cannot work alone. It takes a power user to take full advantage of Excel to get the best results for your business.
https://www.investopedia.com/articles/personal-finance/032415/importance-excel-business.asp