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The Importance of Custom Excel Spreadsheets

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The Importance of Custom Excel Spreadsheets

The need to see data with clarity will never disappear in business. A spreadsheet that is well formatted, flexible and professional looking reduces the potential for errors and misinterpretation. Excel offers a nearly universal means by which to communicate data and numbers. Excel has been around since 1985, and it’s one of the few software tools that businesses rely on across every department and in every niche market. To get the most out of this versatile tool, users must learn how to manipulate it to tell their story in the form of easy-to-read data.

Creating custom Excel spreadsheets saves time and creates a consistent look and feel across files. Automating day-to-day tasks simplifies workflow and helps to facilitate information sharing across departments.

How Financial Departments Use Excel

Accounting activities require a great deal of attention to detail, and Excel offers options for customization that are easy to execute. Excel solutions are endlessly adaptable as small and mid-sized businesses grow and change.

Excel spreadsheets mirror traditional ledger notebooks, and their format is instantly recognizable, making the sharing of financial information between departments seamless.

Customizing Excel spreadsheets within financial departments helps break down large volumes of information into sections that are more digestible. Even simple tweaks like using stripes to make long rows of data easy to follow help a spreadsheet look more professional.

Freezing panes to keep a column or row visible as the user scrolls through data also helps the reader quickly evaluate information in the spreadsheet. Strategically adding color provides visual clarity as well.

How Sales Departments Use Excel

Customer relationship management (CRM) software is notoriously complicated, and many salespeople in smaller companies find that a carefully customized Excel spreadsheet better meets their needs.

With a constant need to provide up-to-date sales figures, including projections and estimates, salespeople who master Excel can use it to become more productive in nearly every aspect of their job.

Creating forecasts for new customer acquisitions, listing expenses for tax and reimbursement purposes, and calculating customer discounts take just minutes with carefully planned custom Excel spreadsheets.

Salespeople with access to training for Microsoft applications learn to use customized Excel spreadsheets with waterfall charts to analyze their sales numbers over a specific period of time. Sales managers and team leaders can use carefully constructed dynamic data combined with Excel slicers to showcase pivot charts with top performing salespeople’s most recent numbers on display.

A salesperson’s time is best spent in front of customers, so any technology that helps them minimize record keeping and paperwork while putting their successes on display is valuable to their bottom line.

Use Corporate Excel Training Programs to Elevate Skills Across All Departments

Companies put plenty of their resources into properly training their employees. Training for Microsoft applications alone is a sizable part of continuing education for a workforce that wants to stay on top of this ever-changing technology.

Corporate Excel training gives employees, managers and owners the power to present data and information in exactly the way they want their customers and investors to see it.

Storing a company’s essential information in an easy-to-read format that all employees can access is one way to make Excel work harder. Better automation, flexible financial modeling and branded Excel tools help companies take their customer-facing and internal communication to the next level.

Customizing Excel spreadsheets makes data easier to read and understand. Sloppy presentation of data devalues the work that went into the project. Learning to customize Excel spreadsheets is well worth the time and effort it takes. In fact, it may be the differentiating factor that gets contributions noticed. Contact us to assist in your Microsoft Excel and other Office 365 platform needs.