Considering learning how to use Excel more effectively? Many people use Excel in their daily work and they are not necessarily accounting or finance professionals. Excel is a robust spreadsheet platform that allows you to effectively track and store a variety of data. This article will outline some of the traditional and non-traditional career paths that can put Excel skills to good use. Once you’ve finished reading this article, you should have a much clearer view of how Excel could be useful in different areas of the business world.

Accounting

As a spreadsheet application, Excel was originally designed to duplicate the large paper spreadsheets that accounting professionals have used for over a hundred years. Accountants are responsible for tracking and categorizing all of the individual transactions that make up the daily operation of a business. Excel is a great tool for this because it allows them to track transaction details, monitor performance against expectations and goals, and provide custom and useful reports on almost any aspect of a company’s accounting.

Finance

Closely related to accounting, finance professionals perform a wide variety of models and analyzes of a company’s performance. Finance can use complex statistical analysis to predict a company’s future performance or find correlations between certain events and the resulting impact on performance. Finance is also used to study the proper capital structure of a company. All of these features are ideal for a spreadsheet tool like Excel.

Marketing

Marketing is a discipline responsible for generating and satisfying the demand for a company’s products. As such, one of its main functions is to direct the company’s resources to the appropriate channels to generate demand and create awareness of the company. These channels are generally known as “advertising” and there is usually a cost involved in using them. This cost can be in terms of human labor or money, but in any case it is an investment that must be tracked and monitored to ensure that it generates an adequate return in terms of new income. Once again, Excel comes to the rescue by providing an easy format to organize all these marketing expenses and relate them to the results they generate.

Project planning

While there are more robust project management tools available, Excel does a fantastic job of planning and managing the simpler projects that come up in business every day. Many project managers will use Excel to create Gantt charts that can provide a visual representation of the steps and milestones of a project and help keep things moving toward the end goal.

As you can see, although Excel was initially designed as a finance and accounting tool, it has other uses. From marketing management to more obscure uses like project tracking, Microsoft Excel is a tool used in a wide variety of jobs. You may recognize how it can be a suitable tool to include in your professional training arsenal.