What is Excel?
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application created by Microsoft in 1985. Excel is a powerful and valuable resource for organizing data and numbers using functions and formulas. It also comes with graphing tools to help visualize data findings, a programming language known as Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) used to create macros, and advanced calculation capabilities. Excel works on both Mac and Windows operating systems.
The cells within an Excel spreadsheet each contain data, like formulas, numbers, or text, which can be organized and analyzed. Excel is a useful tool for performing various calculations on spreadsheets. It can calculate statistics, perform repeated and advanced calculations, analyze data, and create graphical representations of the data, such as graphs, charts, and PivotTables.
What Can You Do with Excel?
Excel has hundreds of features and tools that help users organize, manage, analyze, and visualize data. The following are just a few of the tools and features that make Excel the go-to for professionals around the globe:
- In Excel, users can add or average numbers in cells, locate high, median, or low values, count cells containing numbers, and find a product by multiplying cells. It’s also possible to delete extra white space and truncate numbers by removing fractions.
- Excel can learn your patterns the more you use it so that it can organize your data and ultimately save time.
- Users can share workbooks with others in real-time to ensure that all collaborators have the most up-to-date version.
- It’s possible to work on Excel files from the web and mobile and desktop devices.
- Users can now add data right into Excel from a photo. The Excel app enables users to take a picture of printed data with their iPhone or Android, then convert this image into an editable Excel table. This helpful trick helps users avoid manually entering hard copy data and is made possible through Excel’s image recognition capabilities.
- Financial transactions can be imported into Excel so that users can organize and review their financial information and receive helpful insights toward making more informed financial decisions.
- Excel’s PivotTables help users perform analysis and summaries of datasets, regrouping spreadsheet data for more effective comparisons. By seeing data from different perspectives, it’s possible to get a more comprehensive picture of revenue sources and other vital information.
Common Uses for Excel
Excel has many applications across industries and professions. It is often used for:
- Entering and storing data
- Analyzing data
- Collecting, cleaning, and verifying business data
- Budgeting and accounting tasks
- Visualizing data
- Managing projects
- Creating data reports
- Optimizing managerial or administrative duties
- Reporting on performance
- Creating schedules or calendars
- Managing operations or accounts
- Forecasting
Be a Faster & More Efficient Employee
The more Excel functions, shortcuts, and tools you know, the easier it is to complete tasks that would otherwise take many hours. Creating or running macros is one of Excel’s most time-saving features. Macros can automate many of the repetitive tasks and manipulations that have to be performed on data reports or even standardize the format of a document. Best of all, no coding knowledge is required to create macros, and they can help you complete hours of work in just minutes.
Become Better at Organizing Data
More data than ever is created daily, and Excel is the most-used tool for organizing this data. Those with a background working with Excel can organize vast stores of raw data in various ways that are useful for a company. Using Excel’s advanced capabilities provides additional sorting options that make it easier to analyze the numbers and make any necessary calculations on the data.
Powerful Collaboration Tool
If you’re working on a project with others from your department or elsewhere within your organization, you can all work on the same Excel worksheet or workbook and receive real-time updates on others’ progress. This ensures work is completed faster and everyone working on a project is aware of any changes to the spreadsheet.
Add Value to Your Organization
Excel skills will increase your value as an employee and put you in a position to advance in your current position. Those who actively strive to improve their efficiency and learn new skills and Excel functions demonstrate that they are vital to a company’s success and are less likely to be replaced by those with more advanced skills. So, it’s important to continue to learn new Excel tools and functions, even if you are already proficient with the application.
Make Your Job Easier
As you improve your Excel skills, you’ll find yourself more easily navigating the app and performing job-related tasks with ease. In addition, the shortcuts and features you learn in Excel often translate to other products in the Microsoft 365 suite, streamlining workflow and making it much easier to reuse the spreadsheet data in other programs.
Optimize Your Business’s Assets
Any software, applications, or programs an organization uses are considered assets. However, employees who aren’t trained to optimize these resources go underused. Excel proficiency is a great use of this asset and often leads employees to use other previously under-used assets.
Alleviate IT Support Team Stress
Employees within an organization who haven’t been trained to work with software such as Excel can strain the IT department, which is often responsible for picking up the slack. If IT workers have to train employees on Excel individually, they can’t accomplish more pressing tasks, like maintaining security, installing hardware, or upgrading systems. Employers should ensure that employees who work with data have advanced Excel skills to handle data manipulations rather than waiting for IT to become involved.
Track Business Expenses
Excel offers many built-in templates, one of which helps track professional expenses. The Excel Expense Report template is a popular tool for keeping track of business expenses. It organizes the data into columns and allows users to customize each label or header to meet specific budgeting needs. Excel also offers options for helping users create expense reports manually.
Increase Your Pay Rate
Knowledge of Excel increases job opportunities and can mean a higher starting salary. Because this spreadsheet application is so commonly used, Excel know-how is considered a transferable skill essential to most employers. Therefore, the more you know about Excel, the more professional options with higher salaries you will have.
