Included standard in any Microsoft Office Suite, Excel is one of the most used programs in the world, after Microsoft Word. Most people use it for bookkeeping or for making tables, but below the surface there is so much more that can be done with Excel. Let’s take a look at some of these:

Basic accounting

It was touched on above, but Excel first and foremost jumps out as an excellent accounting tool that can be used as a ledger, only electronically. This means you can easily keep track of money coming in and going out without smudges making the page unreadable and without having to calculate anything yourself; Excel does that for you. Stuff that took our grandparents an entire evening to figure out with pen, paper and an abacus is now done in a few seconds.

Easy access to information

Excel is more than a 21^st-century ledger, of course, and gives unparalleled access and representation of information. With a single click of your mouse, for example, the dry, boring budget figures you’ve entered become graphs or even pie charts that lay out the information in a way that makes it comprehensible in a single glance. Another tool the ledger users of days gone by didn’t possess was the “search” command, which makes it easy for you to find specific information in the blink of an eye.

Central repository

Excel can also serve as a central repository for data, a place where all your information can be centrally found, or at least a place from where you can find the links to all your data. By making sure that all information about a single project or subject is stored in one file, which in turn is part of another, larger file may not be the most elegant solution, but it’s cheaper than buying specific software and you’re still able to find everything you need in seconds.

Customer data

Excel is a great place to store customer data and make it into a repository for that kind of information as well. You can access it easily, you can search through it with no hassle and you can always add to it without any problems. Many companies have stored their customers’ information in a spreadsheet rather than some expensive custom software for this very reason. It works just fine, and you can use that valuable money for other things.

Scheduling

Last but not least, Excel is an awesome scheduling tool: you can just color-code for each employee what’s relevant and pop it into the spreadsheet so everyone can see what everyone else is doing at any given time, be it hour-to-hour, day-to-day or even week-to-week. Miscommunication and not finding someone where they need to be will be a thing of the past.

Excel is much more than a simple ledger, it’s a multi-purpose tool that can be made to fit any need your business may have at a reasonable cost, so start implementing it today and reap the benefits immediately.