The Importance Of Excel In Business

February 25, 2019

Microsoft Excel was released in 1985 and has grown to become arguably the most important computer program in workplaces around the world. Whether you are budgeting, organizing client sales lists, or need to plan an office social gathering, Excel is a powerful tool that has become entrenched in business processes worldwide.

Finance and Accounting

If you walk through the finance or accounting department at any major corporate office, you will see computer screens filled with Excel spreadsheets outlining financial results, budgets, forecasts, and plans used to make big business decisions.

This is the area of business with the biggest reliance and benefit from Excel spreadsheets. Advanced formulas in Excel can turn manual processes that took weeks to complete in the 1980s into something that takes only a few minutes today.

Marketing and Product Management

While marketing and product professionals look to their finance teams to do the heavy lifting for financial analysis, using spreadsheets to list customer and sales targets can help you manage your sales force and plan future marketing plans based on past results.

All parts of business can benefit from strong Excel knowledge, and marketing functions are not exempt.

You Can Do Anything With a Spreadsheet

Using Excel for business has almost no limits for applications. Here are some examples:
When planning a team outing to a baseball game, you can use Excel to track the RSVP list and costs.
Excel creates revenue growth models for new products based on new customer forecasts.
When planning an editorial calendar for a website, you can list out dates and topics in a spreadsheet.
When creating a budget for a small product, you can list expense categories in a spreadsheet, update it monthly and create a chart to show how close the product is to budget across each category.
You can calculate customer discounts based on monthly purchase volume by product.
Users can summarize customer revenue by product to find areas where to build a stronger customer relationship