10 Tips to Better Your Basic Daily Use Microsoft Excel Skills

Microsoft Excel is one of the most popular spreadsheet applications provided by Microsoft used mainly for Data Visualization and Analysis purposes. Most of you already knows very well what’s Excel used for? In this article, we will concentrate more on the importance of Microsoft Excel in daily life.

I am skipping the intro about what is Microsoft Excel. If you are not aware about Microsoft Excel and explore the options available in this awesome spreadsheet program provided by Microsoft in their Office package.

Here we are trying to introduce our readers to some interesting and creative ways to use Microsoft Excel in our daily life. But make no mistake, this is not an exhaustive list.

The applications of Microsoft Excel are plenty. We touch upon a few important ones in the coming paragraphs.

Top 10 Uses of Microsoft Excel in Improving Your Daily Life

1. Budgeting Personal Expenses

Managing daily expenses is a big head ache for most people. Without keeping track on the spending, it’s impossible to cut short your unwanted expenses and save some good money.

Agreed there are many applications which could help you to add and consolidate your expenses on a daily basis. All of them would definitely have an option to download Consolidated monthly or weekly reports as csv files which can be opened as spreadsheets in Microsoft Excel.

As I already mentioned Excel is one of the most powerful Data Visualization and Analysis tool. Using the data collected for your spending, various models can be made for predicting, analyzing and modelling future spending.

A lot of visualization options including a number of different types of graphs and charts are available in Excel for visualization purposes.

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Learning basics of Statistics and applying it to your spending data using Excel options, could help you understand any patterns in your spending, major areas in which you are spending money and also manage your investments to maximize savings.

Use any popular mobile apps for managing your daily expenses and towards the end of every month download monthly spending report as csv files into Excel in your computer. Then you can make use of various Excel analysis and visual tools for managing your expenses for long term.

2. Using Microsoft Excel in Managing Small Businesses

Big companies make use of Enterprise Software’s like SAP, Oracle etc. for mapping and integrating their businesses in one place. They are pretty expensive with a lot of inbuilt features and are created specially for the use of huge enterprises.

Let’s understand how you can use Microsoft Excel as a cheaper alternative to manage your small-scale business comprehensively using its data management features.

Excel is basically a spreadsheet with rows and columns where you can store your business data – about your sales, inventory etc. – in an organized way. Excel also has various features for presenting your data in an attractive way.

Dashboards can be created in Excel through which you can build a presentation layer on top of the data layer.

Apart from using Excel as a database for storing business data, it can also be used for doing various operations on your data.

Excel can do various mathematical operations – like summing up sales over a period, logical operations – like comparing values and statistical operations – like finding maximum, minimum, average sales for various period.

It can sort or filter your data. It can incorporate pivot tables into your data. Also visualize your data using interactive charts. Excel is thus a powerful tool which can be used for reporting and analysis purposes for small and medium scale enterprises.

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3. Uses of Microsoft Excel in Education

Microsoft Excel can aid teachers in educating their children. Most schools have adopted computers for teaching their students. Teachers teach in smart class rooms with access to laptops and projectors. The old teaching techniques of filling class boards with tables and numbers are gone for good.

Teachers can educate children by creating tables and using various charts and graphical objects. Learning would be more effective, fun and interesting with the use of Microsoft Excel.

4. Trading Using Microsoft Excel

Trading in stock markets is a lucrative profession these days. Large number of people does it full time as well as part time to make some good money. They care more about intraday and swing trades as there are more chances of earning from them.

There are many technical analysis strategies that can be applied to past stock data for predicting future prices. Microsoft Excel is a very effective tool which could analyze large amount of data and develop patterns out of it.

Historical data of various stocks can be downloaded from stock exchange websites in csv format. With the help of Microsoft Excel various predictive models can be applied to the past data and thus predict future prices or trends of the stock to a reasonable accuracy.

Microsoft Excel can also be used for back testing various stock market tactics and measure accuracy of particular strategies.

There are various Stock analysis strategies like Exponential Moving Average Analysis, Open High Low Strategy, Gap Up/Down Strategy which cab be back tested for a large set of historical data and then successfully used for Stock prediction with the help of the analytic possibilities of Microsoft Excel.

Trading in stock markets is always a risky affair. The returns one gets is always in proportional to the risk he takes. Excel can only aid in do the calculations for your strategies. Your success is always dependent on the quality of your stock market strategies.

5. Microsoft Excel for Business Presentations

Business Analysts and Consultants make use of numbers of business data to convey strategic opinions to various stakeholders. Data visualization options of Microsoft Excel can be put to use in developing impressive business information dashboards.

Excel could be of great help for Project planning purposes. Gantt Charts and other project tracking tools can be set up in Microsoft Excel which could help in better management of projects.

Microsoft Excel is one important tool for management students as numbers speak more than words with respect to business. Excel helps in making sense out of numbers, thus forming business decisions backed by data.

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6. Multiple Purpose Templates by Excel

Excel has inbuilt templates which can be used for a variety of purposes. Templates falling under different categories like business, personal, planners and trackers, lists, budgets, charts, calendars etc. are available as free templates in Microsoft Excel.

With the wide number of templates provided by Excel, you can create a Gantt Project planner for project management in your company, create monthly budgets, create loan calculators, inventory lists and a lot more.

Get the latest version of Microsoft Excel in your laptop or desktop and get access to the large variety of customizable templates provided by Microsoft Excel.

7. Mathematics Made Easier by Excel

Formula options offered by Microsoft Excel can be used for a number of mathematical calculations. Excel offers a variety of useful functions – mathematical, financial, logical, statistical, lookups and many more.

Excel is more efficient than calculators when you need to apply same calculations to a large list of data. For example, if you have a list of marks in 5 subjects for 1000 students. It would be a hectic task to find total, percentage and grade for all of them using a calculator.

But with Excel it takes hardly a minute – apply the required formulas for the first student and then you apply the same formula to the remaining entries just by dragging. Much convenient, is it?

Also read about the various shortcuts, tips and tricks provided by Excel that can make mathematical calculations much simpler and less time consuming.

8. Excel Macros

Excel also offers yet another amazing feature that goes by the name Excel macros. Macros are sets of instructions stored in Visual Basic that helps you automate actions and commands in Excel without you manually performing them.

Repetitive and complicated tasks can be programmed to run periodically or as per schedule with the help of Macros in Microsoft Excel.

Macros are a vast subject in Microsoft Excel. There is a lot more you can explore regarding macros. Macros can either be recorded or coded using Visual Basic.

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9. Create Various Calculators Using Excel

Apart from the normal calculators to do the basic calculations, there are many calculators made for specific purposes. Interest calculator for loans, Profit calculators based on sales, mortgage payment calculators, Tax calculators, Credit card payment calculators and so on.

With Microsoft Excel, you create formula-based sheets for calculating any of the above values. With the design options in Excel, you can design a dashboard so that there is a better UI inside Excel for your calculator. Excel also has in built templates for various calculators.

10. Maintaining Contact List with Microsoft Excel

Now with everyone having smartphones, storing contact information has become much easier. But with Excel you can store a large amount of contact data permanently and securely. There are applications available in smartphones that could help you import contact data from your phone to excel files.

With the cloud options of Microsoft Office package, contact files created by you can be saved in cloud and shared over internet to anyone in any part of the world.

Excel is one of the most powerful tools offered by Microsoft. This article showcases only a glimpse of that. Explore to learn more.

Summing Up Importance of MS Excel in Daily Life

So far, we have seen few important ways in which Excel can be used for personal use. I guess all of you readers have a reasonable understanding now about the importance of Microsoft Excel in daily life.

Do explore more about Microsoft Excel, understand the inbuilt tools and make your work easier with MS Excel.