Many professionals and Companies have not yet realized how important it is to master Excel skills, so they could work more efficiently, faster and smarter. You can actually leverage the power of Ms. Excel to the level that you could save your or Companies' time, resources and cost!
Microsoft (MSFT) Excel was released in 1985 and has grown to become arguably the most important computer program in workplaces around the world. Whether you are budgeting, organizing client sales lists, or need to plan an office social gathering, Excel is a powerful tool that has become entrenched in business processes worldwide.Â
Finance and Accounting
If you walk through the finance or accounting department at any major corporate office, you will see computer screens filled with Excel spreadsheets outlining financial results, budgets, forecasts, and plans used to make big business decisions.
This is the area of business with the biggest reliance and benefit from Excel spreadsheets. Advanced formulas in Excel can turn manual processes that took weeks to complete in the 1980s into something that takes only a few minutes today. If you would like to learn more formulas, we have the Excel for Professionals course.
Most users know that Excel can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but it can do much more with advanced IF functions when coupled with VLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH-MATCH, and pivot tables.
Marketing and Product Management
While marketing and product professionals look to their finance teams to do the heavy lifting for financial analysis, using spreadsheets to list customer and sales targets can help you manage your sales force and plan future marketing plans based on past results.
Using a pivot table, users can quickly and easily summarize customer and sales data by category with a quick drag-and-drop. All parts of business can benefit from strong Excel knowledge, and marketing functions are not exempt.
Human Resources Planning
While database systems like Oracle (ORCL), SAP (SAP), and Quickbooks (INTU) can be used to manage payroll and employee information, exporting that data into Excel allows users to discover trends, summarize expenses and hours by pay period, month, or year, and better understand how your workforce is spread out by function or pay level.
HR professionals can use Excel to take a giant spreadsheet full of employee data and understand exactly where the costs are coming from and how to best plan and control them for the future.
You Can Do Anything With a Spreadsheet
Using Excel for business has almost no limits for applications. Here are some examples:
When planning a team outing to a baseball game, you can use Excel to track the RSVP list and costs.
Excel creates revenue growth models for new products based on new customer forecasts.
When planning an editorial calendar for a website, you can list out dates and topics in a spreadsheet.
When creating a budget for a small product, you can list expense categories in a spreadsheet, update it monthly and create a chart to show how close the product is to budget across each category.
You can calculate customer discounts based on monthly purchase volume by product.
Users can summarize customer revenue by product to find areas where to build a stronger customer relationships.
This is a very short list to give you an idea of the diverse uses for Excel. On a typical day at the office, I have Excel open 4-8 hours. I could not do my job effectively without it.
When it comes to hunting for a job, perhaps the nerdiest skill you can put in your resume may be the one that sends you over the top.
High proficiency in software like Microsoft Excel is increasingly helping people land jobs, the Wall Street Journal reports based on data from career analysis firm Burning Glass Technologies.
The focus here is on middle-skill jobs that require a high school degree but not necessarily a college education. The study found that 78% of these jobs require digital skills like Excel and word processing.
The study also found that middle-skill jobs in which digital capabilities are important pay more than other positions. Of course, Excel wizardry isn’t just helpful for landing middle-skill gigs. In his 2014 book Young Money writer Kevin Roose described young Wall Street analysts having races to see who could complete Excel spreadsheets the fastest.
The Bottom Line
Excel is not going anywhere, and businesses will continue to use Excel as a primary tool for diverse functions and applications ranging from IT projects to company picnics.
A working knowledge of Excel is vital for most office based professionals today, and stronger Excel skills can open the door to promotion and leadership opportunities.
So frankly speaking, your Excel skills could land you Your next Job!
Excel is a powerful tool but cannot function alone. It takes a savvy computer user to take advantage of everything Excel has to offer to provide the best results for their company.
reference:
investopedia.com, fortune.com