Microsoft Excel, the topmost spreadsheet application, offers plenty of benefits for individuals and business organizations. Being one of the most popular software, people across all industries use Excel for storing, organizing, and tracking data. With various functions and formulas, making calculations on Excel becomes highly convenient.

This guide will highlight the many uses and benefits of Microsoft Excel and show you why you should learn and be familiar with Excel.

What is Excel Used For?

Excel is mainly used for storing and calculating data. Accounting teams often use it for financial reporting and analysis. Some examples of Excel applications include editorial calendars, budgets, and balance sheets.

Thanks to its strong computational power, the spreadsheet program creates accurate financial documents. Accounting professionals use the software to calculate averages, sums, and totals. Excel helps them make sense of their business documents.

Although Excel is primarily used for accounting purposes, professionals from any field can use its formulas and features. For instance, marketers can use Excel to track different types of data.

You don’t have to spend hours counting cells or copying/pasting numbers. Excel offers quick accounting solutions to speed up data analysis and financial reporting.

Microsoft Excel allows you to analyze data and help in decision-making processes. It is an affordable and efficient solution, whether you use Excel to manage your personal or business expenses and databases.

Top Reasons for Using Excel

Here are some of the best reasons for using Microsoft Excel.

Data Analysis and Reporting

One of the best benefits of Excel is robust data analysis and reporting. Using Excel spreadsheets allows you to calculate large amounts of data with efficient sorting, filtering, and search tools. Search tools can narrow down the criteria that will help your decisions.

Combine all these tools with graphs and pivot tables and get all the necessary information. The software is scalable, and you can easily use it at home or at work.

500+ Features

This powerful software has more than 500 built-in functions that you can use for performing specific calculations. For example, Goal Seek is an in-built function in Advanced Excel Functions. This feature allows users to get their desired output when changing assumptions. This process depends on the trial-and-error method for getting results. And even if you find that the 500+ built-in functions don’t serve your need, you can write your very own user-defined function.

Some other essential features in Excel include:

• Pivot Tables
• Paste Special
• Conditional Formatting
• Add Multiple Rows
• Absolute References
• Power Query
• Extend formula across/down
• Flash Fill
• Print Optimization
• Index-Match
• Filters

VBA/Macro Coding

VBA or Visual Basic Application is a subset of the powerful Visual Basic programming language. It comes with most Office applications. While VBA helps you automate processes between and within Office applications, it is not necessary to be familiar with computer programming or VBA code if the Macro Recorder does what you want.

The macro recorder records all the steps in VBA or Visual Basic for Applications code. These steps include typing numbers or text, clicking commands on the menu or ribbon, formatting cells/rows/columns, and importing data from an external source.

Import and Export Data

Another important reason for using Excel is that it imports and exports several file types other than the standard XLSX format. Excel is compatible with many different systems. When users share data between other programs, such as a database, you may need to save data as a different file type. Using Excel as your source, importing financial data for annual or monthly periods becomes super easy.

Benefits of Using Microsoft Excel

This software is widely popular for finance and accounting purposes because it is easy to use. Excel has various front-end and back-end functions. For example, it can produce dashboard summaries and reports on the front end. On the back end, it stores and retrieves data for calculations.

Excel allows users to draw actionable conclusions from data. This reason alone is why entrepreneurs and financial professionals master this program to benefit from its features.

Here are some benefits of using Excel.

Effective and Easy Analysis

The efficient analytical tools of Excel allow users to analyze large amounts of data. That helps users discover patterns and trends that influence decisions. Thanks to the program’s graphing capabilities, you can quickly summarize data and organize it in a visually appealing manner.

All the essential types of charts you need for presenting data are already there. With a single click, you can insert a table that fits your data. The software would also ‘recommend’ a chart for you.

Collaboration

The launch of the Excel Web App made it possible for users to work on spreadsheets with others. This functionality allows users to streamline their processes. It also gives more opportunities to ‘brainstorm’ sessions using large data sets.

Thanks to these collaboration capabilities, you can use Excel Worksheets anywhere. You are no longer tied to your desk. That’s an ideal solution for business people on the go.

Excel iPad and Mobile Apps

Smartphones and tablets bring more convenience to our lives. Installing the Excel app on your device can open new possibilities. Now, you can take your worksheets to any meeting. Whether you visit a client or want to calculate finances from your couch, the spreadsheets are immediately available on your tablet or phone.

Data Transformation

You must deal with messy (unorganized) data in many situations. You can’t use this data without ‘cleaning’ or transforming it. This entire process can waste significant time and is also a tedious process.

The efficient ‘power query’ is a data cleaning and transformation engine that can load data from multiple sources. The engine transforms it and loads it back to the worksheet. This powerful data automation tool allows users to import data through external sources, such as CSV files, Text files, and the Web.

Bottom Line

Most businesses and organizations use Excel for handling statistics, data, and finances. Entrepreneurs and companies also organize, calculate, and evaluate quantitative data. These features make Excel a robust data analysis and decision-making program.