Microsoft (MSFT) Excel came onto the market in 1985, and it emerged as the most popular software application in offices around the world. Excel has become an essential part of business processes worldwide. Microsoft Excel is used for budgeting, creating client sales lists, and planning official social gatherings.
Finance And Accounting:
In the finance and accounting department of any organization, computer screens are loaded with Excel spreadsheets used to develop or manage financial results, forecasts, budgets, and plans for making effective business decisions.
Finance and accounting are areas of business that are mostly dependent on Excel spreadsheets and have many benefits from using them. Back in 1980, manual processes that took several weeks to complete can now be completed in only a few minutes by using advanced formulas provided by Microsoft Excel. There are many online Excel courses available to help users master Excel formulas. (Microsoft, n.d.)
Most people have the perception that Excel is usually used to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but there is a lot more to Microsoft Excel, like the IF function when used with VLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH-MATCH, and pivot tables.
Marketing And Product Management:
While marketing and product managers expect their financial people to do complicated tasks like financial analysis, customer lists and sales targets in Excel spreadsheets can help organize the sales force, and by analyzing past results, future marketing plans can be developed.
The pivot table plays an important role in business as it quickly and effectively compiles customer and sales information by specifying categories with quick drag-and-drop functionality. All areas of business can gain several benefits from Excel knowledge, including marketing functions.
Human Resource Planning:
Businesses use popular database systems such as Oracle, QuickBooks, and SAP to effectively manage payroll and organize employee information. Human Resources professionals retrieve data from the databases and export the data into Excel, allowing them to gain knowledge about trends, outline expenses and hours by pay period, month, or year, and develop a better understanding of how people in the office are arranged by function or pay level.
Human Resources (HR) professionals utilize Excel functionalities and get huge spreadsheets containing employee information, understand the flow of incoming costs, and analyze figures to determine how to plan and control them in the future.
Scheduling:
Through Excel, businesses develop attractive employee and resource schedules. Such schedules are automatically refreshed if any changes are made. Weekly worksheets can be developed using Excel. Each column shows each day, and each row is categorized into different hourly slots or work shifts. The employee or resource name is written in the given slots. For example, the sheet comprising the conference room schedule may indicate that the conference room will remain busy for executive meetings between 9:00 and 10:00 a.m., and on Tuesday, the room will be unavailable due to a conference call. All departments can have full access to the same resource sheet so that everyone can know about the availability of office resources (Walkenbach, 2015).
Return On Investment:
Through Excel, businesses can track their total sales. They can also calculate their total advertising and marketing costs; Excel displays reports related to return on investments for each business operation. If a business sells 50 products in one week with a $10 profit on each product along with an advertising campaign with an expense of $1,000 for one week, there is a need to see the break-even report for that campaign. Excel allows business professionals to track the time required to reach the break-even point and higher profit levels from an advertising venture.
Customer Data:
The focus on creating ad-hoc lists by using Excel often leads to the development of an entire customer data storage structure. If business professionals are using Excel, then there is no need to plan the entire database. Due to the efficient collection and tracking of data, business professionals can quickly develop databases, as explained by the Advanced Excel Business Center. So, Excel is one of the popular choices for business professionals to build and manage customer databases with the capability to grow over time. The database will be flexible enough to accept changes in the existing database structure.
Inventory Management:
Microsoft Excel is one of the most flexible business tools available and one that the majority of us already have, even if some of us regularly avoid it at all costs. Along these lines, using it for inventory administration and stock control is a simple method to cut costs, save time, and organize inventory, provided that you are willing to learn a few new tricks. While it is not an ideal fit for large organizations or anyone with a few thousand distinct items in their inventory, Excel is useful for inventory tracking, stock administration, sales, data, ordering, and more than a dozen other functions. If you know how to use it correctly, you can produce an assortment of highly useful inventory formulas that will enable you to monitor stock, sales, and orders, and much more.
References
Microsoft. (n.d.). Excel help & learning. https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/excel
Walkenbach, J. (2015). Excel 2016 Bible. Wiley. https://www.wiley.com/en-us/Excel+2016+Bible-p-9781119067511
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