Microsoft Excel is a powerful and versatile tool being taught and used by almost everyone in the modern age, and for good reason. Here’s why Excel is so widely used and why you should consider becoming proficient at using it.

Organizing Data

If you have been part of a business, you will be aware of how much information it needs to collect and manage. The task of organizing the data collected becomes significantly easier when you have a tool such as Excel at your disposal. In Excel you can have hundreds of different sets of data combined into one place and use them to make sense of each other. An extra bonus of Excel is that you no longer need space for huge amounts of paper files and can quickly sift through it to find what you are looking for.

Manipulating Data

Now that you have all this data, you can use Excel to automate the processing of it. This means you can instantly work out costs and results of different calculations using the expressions and formulae available to you, such as the Mod function in Excel. You can have separate tables and sheets all leading into one another, change once piece of data, and have it instantly correct the rest of the data based on the new calculation. This alone saves companies hours of time spent working out costs and allows you to use that time on other things instead.  Once you can confidently grasp the formulae in Excel, you will be able to do complex math problems using large amounts of data very quickly

Utilizing Data

Once everything is consistently worked out, you can now use the information gathered and the tools of Excel to display useful data and predict future costs. Visualizing data is very useful and can make or break an important decision for future investments or choices. The graphs can also be used to identify trends or patterns across sets of data and help you accurately predict future outcomes. By predicting future costs, you can responsibly make decisions and figure out what the best course of action would be.

Accessibility

Microsoft Excel is part of a suite of other useful applications known as Microsoft Office. The bundle of applications can be fairly pricey, but they are utilized by almost every business for a reason. The application can be installed almost anywhere if you have internet access and is quick to set up if you have licensing on hand. This makes it very accessible to people and thanks to Office Online or Office 365, it can be worked on through your browser or on different devices which makes it even easier to share and pool data. Office Online allows you to have an online hosted spreadsheet and give access to other people, allowing you to edit or add data simultaneously. This removes the necessity to constantly send files to each other and means people from across the world can work together on the sheet.

Being able to use Microsoft Excel is a very useful skill and greatly increases the number of positions you can work in. Consider giving it a try and experiment to see what it can really do.


Leona Zoey
Leona Zoey

Leona Zoey is a freelance writer, she focuses on tech, business and marketing.