Excel as a Tool in Today’s World
Over the years, Excel has evolved with in-built features and functions which makes it more sophisticated and easily accessible by most business users.
The use of Microsoft Excel in today’s world, goes beyond just a spreadsheet file. Excel as a tool has several functions which makes it versatile, and widely used in today’s business operation.
Excel creates an environment to interact with data, sometimes it is defined as a small database where you can manage your data. Beyond interaction with your data, Excel provides you with various options to perform simple and complex calculation, manipulate text data, clean data, analyze data, and it is a pretty good tool for Visualization.
In fact, it is a go to tool for most analyst and it is widely used in financial operations. Most industries today, take advantage of Excel for their day-to-day activities. despite its functionalities Excel seems to be underutilized by business users. This has led to growing need for Excel specialist making data analyst role incipient and in demand for decision making.
8 great ways to use Microsoft Excel
Excel as tool for Formatting
Excel provides various options for formatting values in the cell. Excel accepts various data types such as date, string, numbers, and Booleans. Formatting values in Excel changes the displays of value in the cell.
Excel as a tool for Calculations:
There are several functions available in Excel, and there are currently over 500 functions as of today. Some of these functions are used for simple and complex calculations, analyzing data, manipulating text, date calculations, lookup information, and performing logical calculation. These functions when properly utilized can help improve productivity and provide easy access to information from your data.
Excel Add-ins
Add-ins extends excel application to improve its functionalities, and once add-ins are installed it can be accessed from any available workbook.
Excel provides various options of accessing and installing Add-in; from the options menu in the backstage view, you can access from the Developers Tab in the Add-ins Group. Add-ins in Excel are classified into three – COM Add-Ins, Office Add-Ins, and Excel Add-in. Add-ins can come in handy when you want to perform Analysis, visualization, Scripting , or other Add-hoc functionalities.
Financial Analysis:
Excel provides with wide array of functions for financial analysis, most of these functions are situated in the financial category of the formula tab. With financial functions you can create financial models, analyze financial performance, plan budgets, measure business performance, forecast and make predictions.
Excel as a tool for Visualization:
Charts, Graphs, Maps provides a way of presenting summary analysis visually. These charts have various subtypes to create beautiful visuals in Excel, and in some cases create dashboards and scorecards to measures business performance.
Excel as tool for Automation:
You can automate your task in Excel, which allows you to avoid repetitions. VBA (Visual basic application) and Macro to create dynamic excel templates, Interact with multiple Excel Files, create applications, dynamic dashboards, games, and allows you to Web Scrape with API’S.
Excel as a tool for Data Analysis:
Excel allows you to analyze small and large datasets with features like Pivot table, Power Pivot, and Analysis Tool Pak. These options allow you to summarize your data and gain insight from your data. In addition, Excel allows you to publish your data to Power BI.
Excel gives you access to various data sources from files databases, cloud, web, and different kinds of data sources. You can extract this data, transform the data, and even model the data for analysis.
Excel connects to various data sources
