Important Ways Excel Is Useful to Your Business

There are still a few places left where business owners laboriously keep written records and rely primarily on instinct to get a sense of what the data is telling them. For some, this is a preference, but for others, it could be that they don’t how to get the most out of that powerful business tool: Excel.

How can Excel help your business?

Microsoft Excel is currently the industry leader in spreadsheet design. The software allows your business to keep intelligent track of your data by organizing it effectively, performing automatic calculations, and even learning your patterns.

The good news is you don’t have to be an Excel pro to get valuable tools that will improve your business. Third parties like Luz Excel Spreadsheets offer a variety of pre-made spreadsheets that you can use, and even better, you can tell them what you need and they can build custom sheet for your needs.

Get information in a more digestible format

Data can be hard to understand, but Excel can render it into column charts, line charts, bar chart, pie charts and many other formats. Instead of looking at multiple columns of numbers, you can immediately get a beautiful chart showing what it all means.

Keep track of inventory

Whether you need to do personal inventories, organizational inventories, or keep track of stock, Excel can help you do it quickly and efficiently. You can even get a custom spreadsheet that alerts you when parameters change in ways you want to keep track of.

Excel is the perfect tool for creating a worksheet that logs progress, keeps track of planning documents, and helps you monitor your progress and the progress of everyone on your team.

Make automatic calculations

Are there calculations you have to make over and over again? In those cases, you can order a custom spreadsheet to do the work for you. All you have to do is put the numbers in and Excel will do the hard work for you. The calculations are instant and always accurate (assuming you input the right numbers).

Excel was first designed to work as accounting software, and that is still one of its strengths. You don’t have to be an accounting master to use it, however. With custom-designed sheets that work to your specifications, you can keep track of the budget, forecast your spending, and even keep up with loan calculations.

Keep calendars and schedules straight

Excel is the perfect way to make calendars for everything from monthly meetings to daily schedules. Excel can be configured to alert you about a change or just to remind you of what to do next.

If you order an Excel sheet, you will have a far more useful to-do list than the one scrawled on paper and tacked on the office note board. Not only can Excel give you a neat view of tasks and dates, but it can even show you a bar chart of progress percentage.

Take project management by the horns

This is where Excel really gets fun. How do you want to keep track of projects? You can use Excel to create waterfall charts of team progress, make a Trello-style Kanban board, implement task tracking, and go in many other directions.

When you want your team to use a particular form for their tasks, all you need to do is order a few spreadsheet templates and then program drop-down menus that let your users choose the form they need from the list.

Keep up with CRM

You could pay for special customer relationship management software, or you could use Excel. Order a customizable, lightweight CRM spreadsheet that lets you keep track of how well you’re serving your customers and increasing your bottom line.

Adam Hansen
 

Adam is a part time journalist, entrepreneur, investor and father.