Why general Microsoft Excel skills are important
Microsoft Excel is a well-known and widely used tool in many businesses. With more than 30 years of development behind it, Excel has become a go-to solution to manage data in many job roles, from administrative assistants to product managers.
Popularity isn’t the only reason why companies opt to use Microsoft Excel for business operations: the software can help to save time and money. It can store and analyze data, and also has features that help employees to automate routine tasks.
Because of its wide range of features, Microsoft Excel is used in many roles. These include:
• Accounting and finance: Financial budgets, expenses, forecasts, and reports are often managed using spreadsheets. Employees working as debtors, creditors, accountants, or in other roles in accounting or financial departments use Excel for the company’s accounting needs.
Human resources: Employee data gathering, structuring, and analysis are often managed in Excel. In addition, departmental functions, budgeting, and events can be managed with the help of spreadsheets.
• Marketing: As a data-driven department, marketing has a lot of data that can be stored, managed, visualized, and presented with the help of spreadsheets. This data may include reports, planning, scheduling, analyses, functions, and more.
• Product management: In a business, product inventory, orders, and processes can all be managed through Microsoft Excel. Individual files can even be adapted to work with files in other departments to aid business functions on both micro and macro levels.
• Sales: From sales projections and customer relationship management to planning and budgeting, spreadsheets are an easy and adaptable way to manage your sales department and its activities.
In addition, Microsoft Excel serves as a tool to manage calendars, lists, logs, charts, and more. And the fact that Excel is already popular is one of the key reasons for its appeal. This means that the well-known spreadsheet program has become a marketable skill, enabling professionals to highlight their expertise when applying for certain positions.
For recruiters, its popularity means the candidate pool has the potential to be quite large. However, the variety of tools available inside the program may make it hard to recruit the right candidate, especially if you’re recruiting for skills that are significantly more advanced than basic computer skills.