Explain the role of excel sheet in business planning and analysis
Answers
Among the computer programs which exist, MicrosoftExcel is one of the most important because of the key role it plays in many sectors. It is the most used spreadsheet program in many business activities, classwork and even personal data organisation.Excel. Chances are, that word alone inspires visions of lengthy spreadsheets, complicated macros, and the occasional pivot table or bar graph.
It’s true—with more than one billion Microsoft Office users globally, Excel has become the professional standard in offices across the globe for pretty much anything that requires management of large amounts of data.
But, if you think Excel is only good for making you cross-eyed while looking at a bunch of numbers and financial reports, think again. As Tomasz Tunguz points out, there are tons of uses of Excel in business (and beyond) outside of simple spreadsheets. In fact, the potential uses are seemingly endless.
There’s no way for us to compile a list that captures every one of Excel’s possible applications (even if you were up for reading a War and Peace-sized listicle).
This is the area of business with the biggest reliance and benefit from Excel spreadsheets. Advanced formulas in Excel can turn manual processes that took weeks to complete in the 1980s into something that takes only a few minutes today. If you would like to learn more formulas, Investopedia Academy has an excel for finance course.
Most users know that Excel can add, subtract, multiply, and divide, but it can do much more with advanced IF functions when coupled with VLOOKUP, INDEX-MATCH-MATCH, and pivot tables. (For more, see the Investopedia Guide To Excel For Finance: PV And FV Functions.)
Marketing and Product Management
While marketing and product professionals look to their finance teams to do the heavy lifting for financial analysis, using spreadsheets to list customer and sales targets can help you manage your sales force and plan future marketing plans based on past results.