Why Is Microsoft Excel Important in Business?

Benefits of using Microsoft Excel in Business

Introduced in 1985, Microsoft Excel quickly became one of the most important computer programs of the 20th century. Nowadays, it is the most widely used and preferred spreadsheet software in the world. With daily users in the billions, its ability to perform an extremely wide variety of functions has made it an industry standard and an indispensable tool utilised by most businesses across almost all industries. There are few workplaces where Excel isn’t used in some capacity, as its data organisation and analysis capabilities are unrivalled. It can also automate repetitive tasks, enabling organisations to save time and money.

That said, employees can benefit from taking Microsoft Excel training courses in many ways, as it allows them to perform their tasks more efficiently and improve their productivity and work output. Below are a few of the advantages it offers for both employers and their workers that make it such a vital part of business as we know it:

How Does Excel Improve Employee Performance?

It Improves Productivity

Microsoft Excel is one of the most powerful software programs around, with a feature set that can flexibly adapt to almost any business use case. Its ability to run advanced formulas and perform complex modelling processes make it a critical asset to those in financial services and accounting. These same features can help marketing and product management professionals strategise for the future by giving them an easy-to-understand glimpse into past performance. With the right set-up, Excel can also help those involved in human resources to manage employee information, work out schedules, put the payroll together, and better understand the organisation’s expenses.

All of the tasks listed above require dealing with a lot of data and making complex calculations. Microsoft Excel eliminates the need to do so manually, creating accurate and trustworthy results and freeing up time so that employees can work on their other, more important tasks.

It Creates a New Skill Set

Just like using any other software application, knowing how to make Microsoft Excel do what you want it to is a skill, one that can especially benefit employees looking to advance themselves towards higher-level positions.

Effectively acquiring these skills may require investing in professional development training courses focusing on Microsoft Excel. After training, though, an employee should be able to navigate around the application with ease, understand its features, create spreadsheets, and work with formulas. This can then lead to the ability to understand and manipulate data more efficiently, identify patterns and problems to come up with solutions as necessary, and do more to improve how work is done throughout the organisation in general.

How Does Excel Benefit Employers?

It Enhances Efficiency

Employees who know how to use Microsoft Excel are an asset to any company. When employees work better and faster, it’s your organisation that benefits. Tasks and projects can be finished on time or even ahead of schedule, thus giving your customers and clients a better experience that will surely impress them.

Indeed, knowing how to use Excel can shave thirty minutes off the time it takes for your people to perform some of the most repetitive tasks that they have to do daily. It all adds up to hours saved at the end of the week.

It Can Be Used for a Variety of Business Functions

To think of Microsoft Excel as only a spreadsheet program is to do it a disservice. It can be used in a wide variety of applications across almost all aspects of a business.

For example, Excel can be especially helpful for managers putting together work schedules for the members of their team. It has a Scheduling feature that is built right into the software, creating a colour-coded, easily-viewed schedule that can be automatically updated in the event of any changes to the tasks assigned for the day.

Small and medium-sized businesses can make use of Microsoft Excel to perform basic accounting for their enterprise. They can use it as a ledger to keep track of all incoming and outgoing transactions, keep track of deposits, and calculate expenditures, just as one would with a traditional ledger. Excel can also display all of this data as charts and graphs for visual representations. SME owners can use these charts and graphs to track their progress over time, and they can refer back to the data when making critical financial decisions.

Lastly, Excel is also excellent for tracking product sales, return on investment (ROI), and customer data. It can function as a powerful database that businesses can refer to when identifying high and low sales trends as well as investments made and profits earned. Businesses can also use Excel to store their customers’ contact information.

Microsoft Excel is an irreplaceable part of many day-to-day business activities. Without it, the world of business simply wouldn’t be the same. Knowing how to harness the full potential of this application is an asset, especially given how integral it is to many business processes. Hence, investing time and effort into learning how to use the program can be a boon to your business in the long run.

Learn Microsoft Excel and see how it can improve your employee’s productivity?