Top 7 Benefits of Advanced Microsoft Excel to Your Business

Microsoft Excel is a pioneer in the mainstream visual data management systems. Major corporations use Microsoft Excel to manage, analyze, and execute business operations. If you still are using traditional methods to keep track of your employees and books, it’s best to shift to a more efficient alternative. Advanced Excel features and functions are now available to upscale your daily business operations.

Here, we will discuss 7 such benefits of using Excel beyond simple addition and subtraction.

1.  Seamless Recruitment Process

Imagine interviewing hundreds of prospects in a short span. It can get messy too quickly. Microsoft Excel helps you manage each of them efficiently with in-built features and formulas.

Looking for the one who had the least experience but had the best approach? You can use VLOOKUP. It is similar to the search function in Excel. The VLOOKUP function helps you search for specific information in a table and extract the corresponding data.

Microsoft Excel covers business areas or aspects where a huge amount of data needs to be created, sorted, and analyzed. You can also consolidate data from multiple tabs within a single worksheet to seamlessly alter and manage different recruitment stages at once.

2.  Create Efficient Reports

Pivot tables are one of the most powerful tools for an advanced Excel user. The small arrow beside a cell which reveals a drop-down list upon clicking is created with the pivot table. It’d be wise for you to make pivot tables for every element of your datasheet containing details of hundreds of prospects of the same nature – like their country.

Generating reports of a survey with hundreds of data sets can be tricky. With the pivot table feature, the task becomes easy and efficient.

With the introduction of Office 360, now you can use Excel Online to collaborate with other contributors of the same project. You might have an associate who is conducting interviews with you. Now, with the online solution, both of you can make inputs in the same file simultaneously.

3.  More Effective Business Management

You can manage your business through advanced features like the IF function and the abovementioned pivot table. MS Excel is a powerful tool to minimize the complications of business management. With the help of statistical and financial functions, you can also keep an eye on the history and forecasts of your sales. Just like a professional employee management solution.

When you upscale, the number of employees increases. After a dozen or so, it gets too complex to keep track of the payment and work status of each of them. If you are disinclined to employ someone to do that, learning basic to advanced Excel can help you to implement it yourself. Employee management with Excel is as easy as carving up a piece of butter. As Excel doesn’t have a limitation of how many entries you can make, you can try making employee management as detailed as you’d like.

4.  Hassle-Free Logistic and Inventory Management

Logistic and inventory management are two aspects where many of the companies use Microsoft Excel to run their day-to-day operations. Generating invoices, updating inventory, tracking the shipments, listing critical dates, managing schedule; everything is being done through Excel. Although it might financially cost you to set the advance features up, it’s well worth it.

5.  Better Data Management and Analysis

Data is one of the key actors in a successful business. Be it the sales figures or employee performance, you’d possibly need to gather and dissect huge amounts of data. Aside from existing complex software and tools, advanced Excel functions can be of help in managing data.

Project and content management analysis get quite easy with Microsoft Excel. Imagine being in the digital marketing business. Your client needs a report on the latest sales figure and investments. Would you keep fumbling through the platforms to get the relevant information or make use of a handy tool to effortlessly export the analysis? The choice is clear. If you don’t have a solution to your data problems, use advanced Microsoft Excel.

The CONCATENATE function in Excel works like a “string.join” function in Python. When you merge multiple cells in Excel, the function just physically leaves you a broader cell. With CONCATENATE, you can merge multiple cell values within one.

SUMIFS and AVERAGEIFS are the two most popular Microsoft Excel functions for a data analyst. SUM and AVERAGE functions are pretty basic, as you might already know. But what if you had to choose only a few hundreds from thousands of inputs? SUMIF lets you decide the logic of choosing summing elements.

Same as SUMIF, AVERAGEIF lets you implement logic to calculate the average.

6.  Rich and Effective Data Visualization

In spite of investing thousands in sales and marketing, it can all go in vain without data visualization. One day, you might see the sales figures and revenues plummet because you couldn’t make necessary corrections beforehand.

Microsoft Excel lets you visualize data in real-time. From pie charts to complex curves, you’d have all the visualization options with Excel. After data analysis, you’d need to put the processed data with specific labels and colors in Excel. Select everything that belongs in the simulation, and click on insert. Choose the graph that suits the cause best and you’re done. Print it out and analyze what you must do.

Remember to include key points or summaries of your visualizations. The graphs should be clear to your employees or clients. Don’t include irrelevant data. Processed data should be well-processed. You’d be better off without letting your office address clutter inventory visualization.

7.  Automating Verification and Formatting

Microsoft Excel truly shines when advanced features like VBA and macro codes are implemented. Although the official Microsoft website doesn’t tell the most of it, macro can be used to model complex automation beyond formatting and coloring.

If you have to add some products to your eCommerce store. You can add the items individually or all at once. You’d obviously choose the latter option if you have multiple products to add.

So, you fill up all the necessary details in the Excel document designed by you, which automatically verifies your data with VBA and macro code.

The macro and VBA options reside in the Developer tab, which is hidden by default. To unhide it, go to the File menu, and Customize the Ribbon to check the Developer option. By unlocking the developer options, you can also use XML commands to get better control of your worksheets.

The Bottom Line

Microsoft Excel can benefit your business in multiple ways. When you are starting to scale up, it’s best not to fund different dedicated solutions at once. Try utilizing the functions of Excel in more advanced ways to get the most value out of your investment. Later, if you feel your solution is lacking, you can always upgrade to dedicated software.

With the help of Microsoft Excel, recruiting employees can ease up and employee management takes a fraction of the time. Further, data analysis moves in parallel with your goals, and automation will be possible. Excel has the solution for most requirements. Just keep learning and utilizing it.