- Microsoft Excel Use In Business
- Use Of Ms Excel In Financial Analysis
- Use Of Ms Excel In Statistics
- Uses For Microsoft Excel
- Basic Use Of Ms Excel
Excel. Chances are, that word alone inspires visions of lengthy spreadsheets, complicated macros, and the occasional pivot table or bar graph.
- Excel is useful for small tasks but not for handling large quantities of metadata. One of the key issues is security: the software, while simple to use, easy to share and collaborate on, is not appropriate in providing any significant level of security or user permissions.
- Use Excel when you: Require a flat or nonrelational view of your data instead of a relational database that uses multiple tables, and when your data is mostly numeric. Frequently run calculations and statistical comparisons on your data. Want to use PivotTable reports to view hierarchical data in a compact and flexible layout.
Using the Excel app, just take a picture of a printed data table on your Android or iPhone device and automatically convert the picture into a fully editable table in Excel. This new image recognition functionality eliminates the need to manually enter hard copy data.
It’s true—with more than one billion Microsoft Office users globally, Excel has become the professional standard in offices across the globe for pretty much anything that requires management of large amounts of data.
But, if you think Excel is only good for making you cross-eyed while looking at a bunch of numbers and financial reports, think again. As Tomasz Tunguz points out, there are tons of uses of Excel in business (and beyond) outside of simple spreadsheets. In fact, the potential uses are seemingly endless.
There’s no way for us to compile a list that captures every one of Excel’s possible applications (even if you were up for reading a War and Peace-sized listicle).
However, in an effort to demonstrate the power and flexibility of everybody’s favorite spreadsheet tool, we’ve pulled together different ways that you could use Excel—both professionally, personally, and just for the fun of it.
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Start free courseAll about numbers
Of course, the core purpose of Excel all boils down to numbers. If you need to sort, retrieve, and analyze a large (or even small!) amount of data, Excel makes it a breeze.
Here are a few broad categories to keep in mind when it comes to implementing Excel for anything numbers-related.
1. Calculating
Find yourself running the same calculations over and over again? Build yourself a totally customized calculator in Excel by programming your commonly-used formulas. That way, you just need to punch in your digits and Excel will spit the answer out for you—no elbow grease required.
2. Accounting
Budget plans, forecasts, expense tracking, financial reports, loan calculators, and more. Excel was pretty much designed to meet these different accounting needs. And, considering that 89 percent of companies utilize Excel for its various accounting functions, it obviously fits the bill.
Excel even has numerous different spreadsheet templates to make all of those processes that much easier.
3. Charting
Pie charts, scatter charts, line charts, bar charts, area charts, column charts—the list goes on and on. If you need to find a way to represent data in a more visual and digestible way, Excel’s ability to transform rows and columns of digits into beautiful charts is sure to become one of your favorite things about it.
Want more information about the types of charts you can create in Excel? This article is a helpful resource.
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4. Inventory tracking
Tracking inventory can be a headache. Fortunately, Excel can help to keep employees, business owners, or even individuals organized and on top of their inventory—before any major problems crop up.
Making a plan
Let’s move on from the numbers—there are plenty of things that Excel can help you plan and organize that don’t necessarily involve endless rows of digits.
5. Calendars and schedules
Need to map out a content calendar for your blog or website? Lesson plans for your classroom? A PTO schedule for you and all of your co-workers? A daily schedule for you or your family? When it comes to various calendars, Excel can be surprisingly robust.
6. Seating charts
From a large corporate luncheon to a wedding, arranging a seating chart can be a royal headache. Fortunately, Excel can make it a total breeze. If you’re a real whiz, you’ll be able to automatically create your seating chart using your spreadsheet of RSVPs. Need help getting this done? This article provides a detailed walkthrough of how you can create a seating chart in Excel.
7. Goal planning worksheet
From professional goals to fitness goals to financial goals, it helps to have something to keep you focused and on track. Enter the beauty of Excel. Using the tool, you can create various worksheets, logs, and planning documents to help you monitor your progress—and, hopefully, cross the finish line.
8. Mock-ups
Excel might not be the first platform you think of when it comes to design. But, believe it or not, you can use the tool to put together various mock-ups and prototypes. In fact, it’s a surprisingly popular choice for creating website wireframes and dashboards.
Getting stuff done
Want to kick your productivity into high gear? Well, Excel can swoop in and save the day with a variety of uses that can help you tackle your tasks and to-dos with ease and organization.
9. Task list
Say goodbye to your standard pen and paper to-do list. With Excel, you can make a far more robust task list—and even track your progress on those larger to-dos that are currently on your plate.
10. Checklist
Similarly, you can create a simple checklist that allows you to tick off the things you’ve purchased or accomplished—from a grocery list to a roster of to-dos for an upcoming marketing campaign.
11. Project management charts
We’ve already touched on the fact that Excel is a total beast when it comes to creating charts. And, this concept holds true when it comes to various charts for project management.
From waterfall charts to manage your team’s progress to kanban style boards (just like Trello!) to keep things organized, there are tons of ways that Excel can help keep your project on track.
12. Time logs
You know that tracking time can be a huge asset to you and your productivity. While there are plenty of fancy apps and tools to help meet that need, you can think of Excel as the original tool for logging your time. And, it still serves as a suitable option today.
Involving other people
Need to collect information from other people? Survey tools and forms are one option. But, rest assured, you can also create your own in Excel.
13. Forms
From simple to complicated, Excel is a great option for creating forms. You can even program various drop-down menus so that users can select their choice from a pre-set list.
14. Quizzes
Trying to test somebody else’s—or even your own—knowledge of a subject? In Excel, you can create a bank of questions and answers in one worksheet, and then instruct Excel to quiz you in another.
Staying in touch
Managing relationships is crucial to your success both professionally and personally. Fortunately, Excel makes it easy to keep in touch.
15. CRM
Need a lightweight CRM to stay top of mind for your customers? You can make one in Excel. And, the best part? Building your own means it will be totally customizable. Sales Hacker also put together a nifty set of free sales excel templates you can use to help get started!
16. Mailing list
Data doesn’t just have to involve numbers. Excel is also great at managing and sorting large amounts of names and addresses—making it the perfect solution for your invite list for that company holiday party or the mailing list for that large promotion or campaign.
Using Excel, you can also mail merge—which makes it that much easier to print address labels and other necessary materials.
You can also apply a similar concept to create things like directories, RSVP lists, and other rosters that involve a large amount of information about people.
Just for fun
Excel doesn’t need to be all work and no play. There are plenty of other fun things you can create using the spreadsheet tool.
17. Historical logs
Whether you want to keep track of the various craft beers you’ve tasted, the workouts you’ve completed, or something else entirely, you can think of Excel as your go-to resource for keeping those things sorted and logged.
18. Sudoku puzzles
Love Sudoku puzzles? As it turns out, you can make your own in Excel. Or, if you find yourself stuck on a particularly challenging one, you can enlist the help of Excel to help you get it figured out!
Need help creating the Sudoku solver and generator? This post will get you well on your way!
19. Word cloud
Word clouds might not be the most scientific representations of data. But, they’re a fun (not to mention beautiful way) to gain an understanding of what words are being utilized most. You guessed it—you can create one using Excel. Here’s how to use information from Excel to create a word cloud in Wordle.
20. Art and animations
The capabilities of Excel likely extend far beyond what you’d initially anticipate. In fact, many people have used the tool to create some downright awesome art—from pixelated portraits to animations.
21. Trip planner
Microsoft Excel Use In Business
Have a vacation coming up? Make sure you have everything covered by creating yourself a helpful itinerary before you pack your bags and head out. Excel even has a handy trip planner template you can use to make sure you don’t miss anything (from your budget to airline information!).
Over to you
This might seem like a lengthy list. But, rest assured, it barely scratches the surface of all of the different things—aside from simple spreadsheets—that Excel is capable of. From lists to charts to design mock-ups, the different uses of Excel are seemingly limitless.
Feeling intimidated? Don’t worry - you can learn Excel online, all at your own pace, and become a spreadsheet ninja in no time.
Do you have something cool you like to create using Excel? Let us know in the comments!
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Start free courseDon’t know how to create a simple database in Excel? In this article, I will show how you can make a database in Excel in just simple 8 steps.
Do you find MS Access as a complex tool to use as a database? Then Excel is a great tool to do that.
Let’s learn the technique…
Table of Contents
- How to create a database in Excel
How to create a database in Excel
Unfortunately, they don’t teach hardcore Excel or MS Office tools in our respective schools and colleges. So, all the complicated functions and laws you read in your extremely awesome degree becomes just a theory, unsupported by real-life data. You’d think that it’s only data. But you should be well aware of the fact that it’s lovingly called a data dump. Yes, it’s so much in the quantity that you’d need a dumpster to tow it out of sight.
Hence it’s of extreme importance to be able to arrange this dump in a much readable format – a format which at least vaguely looks like that theoretical concept that defined the phenomenon for this data.
MS Office functions come in extremely handy when struggling in such situations. Access is the standard database you should be using, but it’s a little complicated to learn and master before that first business meeting of your life tomorrow. Excel on the other hand is a little more familiar and easier to handle.
If you design your Excel workbook correctly, you can use it as a database easily. The main key point is: you have to design your workbook correctly. You can sort data in many different ways; you can filter the database to see only the data that matches some specific criteria.
Read More: Intro to Relational Database Management System (RDBMS) Concepts!
So, in this post we will take an example and demo you the steps in which you will be able to create an Excel-based database.
Step 1: Entering the data
The columns in a database are called fields. You can add as many may be necessary.
So, the Fields of this database are StdID, StdName, State, Age, Department, and Class Teacher.
You can now enter data into the database easily. Every new input will be added to the first empty row after the Fields.
I did some. Let me show you how I enter another entry.
Say this is the input that has to be inserted into the database:
StdID: 1030456042,
StdName: Jemmy Fox,
State is Oklahoma,
Student age 25,
Department CSE,
And the class teacher is Mr. John.
So, you see entering data into an Excel database is pretty basic.
Step 2: Entering Data Correctly
When you will enter data into a database, you cannot leave a row empty. This is strictly prohibited.
Say after the last row, I put some data in the 2nd row from it:
StdID is 103457045,
StdName is Jackson,
State is New York,
Age 23,
Department ETE,
And the class teacher is Mr. Balmar.
This is a clear breakdown of this database.
Although it might happen that some of the cells in a row could be empty. Let’s say something like this is legal.
On the same lines, another rule is: there will be no completely empty column in a database.
Use Of Ms Excel In Financial Analysis
What happens as soon as Excel encounters a completely blank row or column is that it’s unable to include that row or column in the database. For Excel, this database is now divided into two parts, an entirely new and unconnected set of information. Whatever functions you plan on doing with, your data will not be performed on this disconnected piece of information. For example, something as simple as filtering will be unsuccessful as you can tell by experience.
Read More: Top 10 Advantages of MS Access Over Other DBMS
Step 3: Know that the Rows are called Records
The next thing you have to know is: each individual row in a database is known as records.
All the rows are records. Here I have marked a few for clarity.
Step 4: Know that the Columns are called Fields
All these columns are Fields. The headings of the columns are known as Field Names.
So StdID, StdName, State, Age, Department, and Class Teacher are six Field Names of this database.
Note: It is important to format the Field Names differently than the other rows in the database. These table Field Names are formatted with different styles than other cells in the table.
Step 5: Creating the Table
To create a table: Just select any cell in the data range, Insert tab, and click on the Table command.
Create Table dialog box appears. I take what Excel suggests. Yes, my table has headers. Click OK, and a table is created. Tada!!!
You can filter data using the drop-down arrows that appear at the headings of each column. If you want to learn table manipulation more go visit the Table portion here.
Step 6: Using the Database Tools
The database tools can come in handy with your data analysis and interpretation. You can and should learn more about these tools here.
Step 7: Expanding the Database
Now that everything is up and running, you can start adding more fields and records (you see what I did there) to your database. It’s as basic as Step 1.
Step 8: Completing the Database Formatting
The last and final step is formatting the database columns. There are so many tools to format the cells in a database. You can work with Cell Styles, you can use the styles under the “Format As Table” drop-down, and you can work with the commands in the Format Cells dialog box. You can use the Custom number format. All these techniques are described in our previous lectures.
So, there you go! You created your very own database in Excel (until you master Access or you run out of Excel space and processors).
This is again a short summary of how to create a database in Excel.
Download the working file
Use Of Ms Excel In Statistics
For further clarification, the working files have been added with a bonus sample of a Banking Database. Drill down through the 8 steps to understanding how this database was created and can be used!
Uses For Microsoft Excel
Read More:
Basic Use Of Ms Excel
Welcome to my Excel blog! It took me some time to be a fan of Excel. But now I am a die-hard fan of MS Excel. I learn new ways of doing things with Excel and share here. Not only how to guide on Excel, but you will get also topics on Finance, Statistics, Data Analysis, and BI. Stay tuned!
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