6 Free Ways to Use Microsoft Excel to Improve Your Business Processes

To some Microsoft Excel is a puzzle that they just can’t seem to solve. While to others, it is the springboard for almost 100% of their work. As consultants, we know that Excel is crucial not just for ensuring your business runs smoothly, but for producing great deliverables for your clients. There are a number of ways you can use Excel, but today we will focus on how it can be used to improve your business processes.

What is Microsoft Excel?

Excel is a piece of software developed by Microsoft which is used extensively all over the world. You can use Excel to arrange data and numbers using certain formulae and functions. Many businesses, big and small, utilise excel to perform financial analysis and other data-based tasks.

How to use Excel to Improve Your Business Processes?

Visualise Your Data

Data is only useful to you when you know how to use it and how to visualise it correctly. Rows of numbers mean nothing if you can’t substantiate what they mean, or give some context around them.

Excel gives you the power to turn numbers into narrative-driven charts and graphs. Enabling you to present a client with information that is both effective in telling a story and easy to understand. For instance, many rows of numbers are difficult to understand, but a line graph illustrating profit gains can be quite convincing.

Trend Analysis

A huge spreadsheet full of data means nothing if you cannot identify particular trends that run through said data. Trends are an effective tool because they help you decide where to put your time, money, and resources. You can extrapolate current data in Microsoft Excel as well to get a feel of the direction your business is taking.

Improve Customer Experience

Believe it, or not, you can even use Excel to improve your customer experience and thus your customer retention. Spreadsheets are an excellent way to keep the data you have on your customers organised. It is easier to access your customer’s email addresses, phone numbers and other key information when they are stored centrally in a spreadsheet. Spreadsheets can enhance the overall consumer experience by keeping you more informed. All the information you need is just a click away in Microsoft Excel.

E-Commerce

If you run an e-commerce business, Microsoft Excel is an invaluable tool which can be used to manage your product data. If a potential customer approaches you with a question about one of your products, having everything centrally located in a spreadsheet can be helpful. The alternative is having to recollect every detail of every product which is incredibly challenging for you to remember.

Scheduling

Excel can be surprisingly helpful when it comes to calendars, scheduling and planning. You can use it to support you in scheduling your staff’s shifts, annual leave or break times. Keeping all of this information in one spreadsheet means that you will always have visibility of what is going on within your business, and allows you to make any necessary changes to any staff member’s schedule with a press of a button.

Track Sales

One of the best indicators of business growth is an increase in sales. You can use Microsoft Excel to monitor your product sales or even to forecast your future sales using this current data. You can also isolate specific data to monitor product sales over a predetermined time period, such as daily, monthly or quarterly.

Concluding Thoughts

In conclusion, it is apparent that Microsoft Excel can support your business in a number of valuable ways including tracking sales, trend analysis, and visualisation of data and it can even help to improve your customer’s experience. If you want to learn more about how Excel can help your business, get in touch with us.