Excel is perhaps the most important computer software program used in the workplace today. That is why so many workers and prospective employees are required to learn Excel to enter or stay in the workplace.
From the employer’s point of view, particularly in the field of information systems, the use of Excel as a computer tool for the end user is essential. Not only are many business professionals using Excel to perform everyday functional tasks in the workplace, but an increasing number of employers rely on Excel to support their decisions.
Overall, Excel dominates the spreadsheet product industry with an estimated 90 percent market share. Excel 2007 has the capacity for spreadsheets of up to one million rows by 16,000 columns, allowing the user to import and work with massive amounts of data and achieve calculation performance faster than ever.
Outside of the workplace, Excel is widely used for everyday problem solving.
Let’s say you have a home office. You can use Excel to calculate the sales tax on a purchase, calculate the cost of a car trip, create a temperature converter, calculate the price of pizza per square inch, and analyze the data entered. You can track your debt, income, and assets, determine your debt-to-income ratio, calculate your net worth, and use this information to prepare for the new home mortgage application process. The personal uses of Excel are almost as endless as the commercial uses of this software, and an Excel tutorial delves into the practical uses of the program for personal and business use.
The use of spreadsheets on computers is not new. Spreadsheets, in electronic format, have existed since before the introduction of the personal computer. The precursors to Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 were packages like VisiCalc, developed and modeled after the accountant’s financial ledger. Since 1987, spreadsheet programs have had an impact on the business world. Along the way, computerized spreadsheets have become a ubiquitous and increasingly effective tool for comparative data analysis around the world.
Today, end users use Excel to create and modify spreadsheets, as well as to create web pages with complex formatting specifications and links. They create macros and scripts. While some of these programs are small one-time calculations, many are much more critical and affect important financial decisions and business transactions.
Widely used by businesses, service agencies, volunteer groups, private sector organizations, scientists, students, educators, trainers, researchers, journalists, accountants, and others, Microsoft Excel has become a staple of end users and business professionals. .
The beauty of Excel is that it can be used as a receiver for employment or business data, or as a calculator, decision support tool, data converter, or even a visualization spreadsheet for interpreting information. Excel can create a chart or graph, work in conjunction with the mail merge functions, import data from the Internet, create a concept map, and sequentially rank the information by importance.
Excel offers new data analysis and visualization tools that help you analyze information, spot trends, and access information more easily than in the past. By using conditional formatting with rich data visualization schemas, you can evaluate and illustrate important trends and highlight exceptions with colored gradients, data bars, and icons.
In fact, Excel can be customized to perform such a wide variety of functions that many businesses cannot operate without it. Excel training has become mandatory in many workplaces; in fact, software training is a must for any workplace trying to keep up.
Let’s say you are an employer with 97 workers, 17 of whom reported sick today, and you want to know the percentage of those who are absent. Excel can do that. You can learn Excel and use it to determine the ratio of male to female employees, the minority percentage on payroll, and the ranking of each worker by compensation package amount, including the percentages for that package based on salary and benefits. You can use Excel to track production by department, information that can help you with future development plans. You can create additional spreadsheets to keep track of supplier and customer data while maintaining a continuous inventory of product stocks.
Let’s say you want to know your company’s output versus cost. You don’t have to be a math whiz, you just have to learn Excel. Excel allows you to enter all the data, analyze it, sort it according to your custom format, and display the results with color, shading, backgrounds, icons, and other tricks that offer time-saving assistance and then precisely locate the information you want. If this spreadsheet is for presentation purposes, Excel helps you put it together in such a visually appealing way that the data can seem to pop and shine.
The most important thing an employer can do is learn Excel – it is one of the most essential tools in the workplace.
Excel and Microsoft are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation, registered in the US and other countries. Lotus is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the US and / or other countries.