Thinking of learning how to use Excel more effectively? Many people use Excel in their day-to-day jobs and are not necessarily financial or accounting professionals. Excel is a robust spreadsheet platform that enables you to track and store a variety of data effectively. This article will outline some of the traditional and non-traditional career paths that can put Excel skills to good use. After 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 intended to duplicate the large paper-based spreadsheets that have been used by accounting professionals for over a hundred years. Accountants are responsible for tracking and categorizing all the individual transactions that make up the day-to-day running of a business. Excel is a great tool for this because it allows them to track transaction details, monitor performance against expectations and targets, and provide useful, personalized reports on almost any aspect of a company’s accounting.

Finance

Closely related to accounting, finance professionals perform a wide variety of modeling and analysis of a business’s performance. Finance can use complex statistical analysis to predict the future performance of a business 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 functions are ideal for a spreadsheet tool like Excel.

Marketing

Marketing is a discipline in charge of generating and satisfying the demand for a company’s products. As such, one of their main functions is to direct the company’s resources into the right channels to generate demand and create awareness of the company. These channels are generally known as “advertising” and there is generally 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 is generating an adequate return in terms of new income. Once again, Excel comes to the rescue by providing a simple format to organize all these marketing expenses and relate them to the results they generate.

Project planning

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

As you can see, although Excel was initially conceived as a financial and accounting tool, there are other uses for it. 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 that it may be a suitable tool to include in your career training arsenal.