Microsoft Excel, as you probably know, is the world’s most widely used spreadsheet program, and is part of the Microsoft Office suite. Other spreadsheet programs are available, but Excel is by far the most popular and has become the world standard.
Much of the appeal of Excel is due to the fact that it’s so versatile. Excel’s forte, of course, is performing numerical calculations, but Excel is also very useful for non-numeric applications.
What Is Microsoft Excel Good For?
Here are just a few of the uses for Microsoft Excel:
- Number crunching: Create budgets, analyze survey results, and perform just about any type of financial analysis you can think of.
- Creating charts: Create a wide variety of highly customizable charts to assist users in identifying data trends.
- Organizing lists: Use the row-and-column layout to store lists efficiently.
- Accessing other data: Import data from a wide variety of sources.
- Creating graphical dashboards: Summarize a large amount of business information in a concise format.
- Creating graphics and diagrams: Use Shapes and the new SmartArt to create professional-looking diagrams.
- Automating complex tasks: Perform a tedious task with a single mouse click with Excel’s macro capabilities.
Examples of Using Excel
For regular official tasks, the Microsoft Excel program offers a broad range of functions and capabilities. Let's look at how different sorts of consumers throughout the globe utilize Microsoft Excel capabilities in their everyday lives.
In Business Sector
Does anyone believe that a business owner, whether small or large, can be effective and run their firm without using Microsoft Excel? The Microsoft Excel program is utilized in a variety of business situations. Goal-setting, budgeting, and planning, team leadership, account management, revenue and expenditure calculations, product offerings value, and client data management are all examples of commercial activities. Microsoft Excel is used in business to make everyday official processes more efficient, precise, and predictable. Excel has a lot of valuable tools, including filters, charts, conditional formatting, pivot tables, and logical and financial formulae.
In Education Sector
Teachers might employ table layouts, forms, charts, data tools, and algorithms to instruct pupils in the classroom. Excel allows students to understand and solve fundamental and logical-mathematical issues as well as statistics. Teachers may teach students by using an Excel sheet to create a table. They may use color to highlight more attractive cells, emphasize critical numbers, and use bars and charts to illustrate data.
Goals Setting and Planning
Financial, professional, and physical objectives may all be planned using Microsoft Excel. These provide you with a clear perspective of something to concentrate on while keeping you on track. These actions and tasks are accomplished by creating spreadsheets, plan papers, and logs utilizing Excel to track progress and reach the finish line.
Data Analysis
Working for an internet company or website owner requires a lot of data analysis (e-commerce, blog, forums, etc.). Tracking website traffic, sales revenue, user reviews, marketing strategies, user activity, and events are just some things that are done. Such a task takes a long time and requires a lot of thought, mainly when things don't go as planned.
For online company owners and consumers, the Microsoft Excel program has a lot of advantages. Filtering users' data by nation, filtering consumers by age, applying conditional formulae to massive data, and so on are routine everyday activities with which excel can help you.
What Is Microsoft Excel not Good For?
Excel Is NOT a Database! It’s never been a database. It never will be a database.
If you use excel spreadsheet as a database, and a year or three later, you are still using that spreadsheet, only it’s grown to 100,000 rows and takes 5 minutes to open it. Unless you’re intending this spreadsheet to be a list of your 50 or so employees with phone numbers, you’re probably better off with a spreadsheet. Best practice is store your data in Microsoft Access and connect to it from Excel, you will gain the benefits of both.
why you should use a database to store data and not a spreadsheet:
- Data recovery is more efficient.
- Queries, and the reports based on those queries, are easier to write and run.
- A database stores information more efficiently.
- More than one person can update a database at a time.