Business Uses of Excel

Take a look at these business uses of Excel provided or asked by our participants from "Excel Course for Business Professionals"

Tracking Updates in Forecasted Sales

There are 2 ways you could track the updates in forecasted sales. One is to use the advanced version of conditional formatting and the other is to use the readily available highlight changes function is Excel. Both methods are present in this tracking updates page.

Excel Calendar

Creating a 12 months calendar is no small feat. You have to know when the first day of the month begins in the week and then run the consecutively till the end of the month. It could be 28, 29 (for Feb), 30 or 31 for other months. It is definitely doable if it is done manually, but what if you need to generate the calendar of any year with a click of a button. And how to make the calendar highlight the public holidays without you having to find the exact location of that date in the year. This excel calendar page will show you how to create it, WITHOUT using macros. If all you want is to use it, then click on this other excel calendar link.

Stock Management

Vlookup helps me to reconcile stock reports from my external warehouse. It is very productive as the reconciliation takes less time when you have a LONG list of inventory.

Shipment Planning

Pivot Table gives me the basics of creating our shipment planning forecast. A very benefiting tool for segregating data you require.

Merging Data

Before, I had to manually merge data. Now with Vlookup, merging data and manipulating them is a breeze!

Create forms

Excel is a powerful tool for designing my questionaire for manpower survey as I can save money on temp staff to do data entry! It helps me greatly in my analysis of data too as I can customise what information to retrieve and how to present my results.

Performance Tracking

Conditional formating and creation of a survey form using the functions in excel are very useful for me to do my work more quickly. Conditional formating because it is very useful in performance tracking.

The functionality of Excel that can assist to track business performance and achieve growth.

Find Breakeven point

Using the Goal Seek function, we can find the breakeven point quickly.

Identify Blank Rows

The conditional formatting. I want to auto-highlight those rows that are urgent/blank. Time saving was beneficial.

Duplicate Records

I used to sieve duplicate records manually but now I can use advanced filter to do that.

Extract data from ACCPAC/SAP

The Excel Pivot Table combined with MS Query are fantastic tools! I managed to use them to extract the required data from Accpac and submit it to my Organisation's HQ in Germany.