Microsoft Excel, launched in 1985, proved to be a big game-changer for businesses. It completely revolutionized the ways companies used to store, analyze, build, access, and retrieve information. The struggle of going through and maintaining a stack of files finally got over with excel. As per the excel consulting experts, it is the most valuable and powerful software program that any business can use for better data management.
With the service sector taking over the economies and businesses getting closer to the customers, the relevance and importance of Excel increased every day. Gone is the time when excel was used for its primary and intermediate functions like data sorting, totaling, averaging, drawing graphs, etc. Instead, excel has moved over to the more advanced form of tasks that enable you to perform data analytics, simulation, and more.
Excel has now undoubtedly become a part of every business, be it big and small. So much is the popularity of excel that it is used synonymously to a spreadsheet.
Benefits of Microsoft Excel
1. Complex Task Made Easy
One can perform a range of functions in excel to study, analyze and crunch data.
2. Basic and Intermediate Functions
The primary functions include data sorting, data formatting, and essential statistical functions like counting, sum, time, now, if function, etc. Excel also equips you with a range of different charts to present your data in graphical form.
The intermediate skills involve making pivot tables, named range, drop-down lists, conditional formatting, idea button, sparklines, Text to the column, quick analysis tool, etc.
3. Advanced Functions
The advanced functions of excel require a higher degree of expertise in excel. Therefore, it is imperative to know these features to get maximum benefits for the business. The advanced functions consist of advanced excel formulas like time difference, average highest values, index match, etc., advanced excel charts, visual basics for applications to write VBA codes, power query, data modeling through power pivots, etc. Excel consulting experts keep you up with the latest techniques that make your everyday business more manageable.
4. Applying for Businesses
The businesses’ love for excel gets stronger as excel gives them the power to turn their businesses into success stories by helping them stay organized. Excel assists you in every job in every field. Out of the many ways in which excel can assist and solve business problems are:
- Marketing & Branding: Excel can create a single database for all the events and use it to fill weekly calendars, color code activities with a list of segments. Prepare required financial, activity, and trend reports by generating pivot tables. The more significant advantage is that it would be swift to prepare further customized reports for the future.
- Banking & Insurance: Calculating beta values to measure portfolio risk, predicting trends, running sensitivity analysis are just a few functions that excel can perform for this industry. Excel can also perform modeling to identify which inputs are fixed, which variables require modeling and the desired flexibility. For example, use it to know the company’s total equity capital and value per share.
- Healthcare: Gets data from fixed form designs to create aggregate files, thus getting access to all patient information files and extracting 150 data points. Managers can then spot trends and patterns using excel’s package of analytical tools.
- Logistics: Excel can easily track goods and services delivery by preparing a simple list of locations, times, and quantity of items to be delivered. Adding code to the excel sheet makes it easy as such lists can be produced each day based on original data at a single click. Such lists can be circulated to others, too, for cross-checks.
- Research: In excel, you can use VBA for many different things. You can enter, copy and paste data in data cells or a range of data cells. You can easily automate tasks that are time-consuming and repetitive, such as using macros to create pivot tables, making custom-defined functions, converting these codes to add-ins and share, and allowing integration with other programs and files.
There are many functions available in excel which can be of interest and add to the productivity of any organization of any type. Functions like VLOOKUP help you get a look at the quantity sold of a particular product, find sales bonuses, come up with the interest rate flow in a specific financial model with a specific schedule of debt, etc.
Index match generates a financial summary, makes a purchase order with a price list, gets you the sales figures for a specific month for a particular salesperson, etc.; conditional formatting helps to generate heat maps.
Excel Consulting Experts
To avoid getting into Excel Hell and the frustration it causes, it is advisable to hire excel experts who can turn your problems into practical solutions. An excel expert makes sure that you are getting the best out of this software program. In addition, they have the experience to comprehend data to build strategies that give high-impact solutions at lower costs.
The experts let you use the most advanced features like advanced data visualization, custom excels, and Power BI dashboard reporting.
Future
The future lies in integrating and collaborating excel sheets with other tools and software programs like CRM, SCM, Power BI, SharePoint, etc., to perform advanced tasks with higher precision in real-time to upkeep with the organization’s ever-changing needs.
