5 Popular Uses of Microsoft Excel in Business


5 Popular Uses of Microsoft Excel in Business

Released way back in 1985, Microsoft Excel has become indispensable in the business world. Almost, any business process can benefit from Microsoft Excel Training making it an extremely powerful application. You can utilize excel for storing information, analysing and sorting the same, and even for reports preparation. In this post, we are going to have a look at the 5 popular uses of Microsoft Excel in business.

Microsoft Excel and its Use in Business

  1. Data Entry

Of course, the first use of Microsoft Excel in business that comes to mind is the basic one i.e. data entry. If you are utilizing Excel for keying in and storing data, you will already know that the total number of rows and columns on a worksheet are 1,048,576 and 16,384 respectively. Hence, it is quite obvious that you can store loads of data in an excel spreadsheet.

Data entry and storage in excel helps you in managing the people. Of course, a business will have a lot of people employed under it. Microsoft Excel is a great way to manage and organize all the information about these people irrespective of the designation they hold. Personal information can be effortlessly stored in an excel spreadsheet and retrieved whenever required. You can designate a row or a column to each individual for storing his/her personal information.

  1. Administrative tasks in the office

Since a majority of the businesses utilize Excel to store data; the same data can be utilized later for office administration tasks like business analysis, accounts and financial information, performance check, and more.

Though there are a lot of tools for performance monitoring and reporting, a lot many businesses still use the popular Pivot table in excel. Pivot tables come with a ton of in-built functions that enable the user to perform numerous tasks on the data.

As far as finance and accounting are concerned, excel is majorly utilized for running calculations on numbers, creating financial reports, and even in delivering forecasts and making plans supporting various business decisions.

Moreover, there are daily business tasks like keeping a proper record of the invoices and bills.

  1. Analysing the Business

As you already know businesses have a huge amount of data rolling at the backend which is collected based on their daily activities. This data can be anything ranging from sales, traffic acquired on the website to inventory management, and more.

By analysing the business, we mean that through this data vital information can be gathered which could be useful for the people running the business in taking some strategic decisions. As an example, analysis on sales-related data can be made through which the business can be given a variety of useful information like on which day sales were the highest, which day sales were the lowest, target audience and more. Hence, we can easily say that countless decisions in a business are taken based on the reports generated by excel. This is especially true for small to medium-sized businesses that cannot afford high-end software.

  1. Managing Contracts

This might be new for you but contracts can be easily managed in Microsoft Excel. In fact, a majority of the persons who are responsible for taking care of the contracts use Excel to store different contract details. These contract details can include anything ranging from dates mentioned in the contract, different milestones or benchmarks, delivery-related information to payment modes.

As you might already know every contract has a complete cycle. Hence, to accommodate different types of contracts and even the different types of stages that can exist in a contract, Microsoft Excel provides a variety of templates as well. By putting the vital information related to a contract in these templates, one can easily keep track of whether everything is running in accordance with the signed contract. A bit of deviation also can be easily tracked and thereafter analysed and rectified with the help of the contract management functionality of Microsoft Excel.

  1. Managing the Account

As you already know a business can have different accounts within it and each account has an account manager. This is especially true for IT companies who have multiple clients under their hood and are responsible for taking care of their business.

Here, an account manager plays a vital role since he/she is responsible for working towards sustaining the relationship with the clients. Every business works towards acquiring the loyalty of their clients so that the clients continue to acquire their products or services. An account manager has to play a significant part here since he/she is administering and overlooking the entire activity of the account. He/she has to ensure that the people working in the account are delivering their duties as expected by the client.

An excel plays a significant role here since it can be utilized to keep track of the account activity as well as can be utilized to maintain client-related files effortlessly. Both help the account manager to take strategic decisions towards nourishing the relationship with the existing client.

Conclusion

From the above points, it is safe to conclude that no component of a business is untouched by Microsoft Excel. It plays a vital role in every sphere of the business. Small to medium-sized businesses; most of them; completely rely on Microsoft Excel for their business needs and requirements.Hence, Microsoft Excel Training is a must for those aspiring to run a business of their own or looking forward to work with a business organization.