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Microsoft Excel is a world renowned spreadsheet generation tool and is a staple in pretty much every office job I have ever worked at. When I started at my first office job, management asked if I wanted to be trained how to use Excel. Now me thinking it was just to generate numerical lists that calculate automatically (which I learnt in school) I said no. Little did I know just how many things excel can be used for and quickly found myself backtracking and sheepishly asking management if I was in time to be placed on the course.  Let’s take a little look at some of the major applications of Excel.

Automatically generate graphs.

One of the first tasks that came through to me in the previous scenario was that I was to create a series of graphs out of a spreadsheet of data that I was to organize into an easy to read format. Now at the time I was completely unaware that Excel even had this feature. After inputting the data into the spreadsheet, highlight it with a simple drag and click motion. Then proceed to select the chart that you like and format the colour to your liking, this is something that does take a little bit of practice as different charts require different data inputs.

Automated Invoicing

Probably its most well know use and something that I have (thankfully) have never had to use personally in my career, is its bookkeeping and accounting application. From what I understand, Excel can automatically perform different mathematical processes of varying degrees of complexity, from simple add and subtract, to calculating ROI spreadsheets and calculating invoice amounts. Its impressive to see just how intelligent Excel can be even going so far as to take text commands like the command “EXACT” will analyze a group of cells to establish whether they hold the same value and responding to your command with text (TRUE = Same Value, False= Different Value)

Expand using more complex formulas

Apparently, once you have learnt all the relevant formula’s you can then expand on what you have learnt by using them in conjunction with each other to form what is known as a “multi part formula”. So for example, you can command Excel to add together a range of data, say the amount paid by clients, then you can ask excel to subtract a set percentage, General Sales Tax let’s say 10%, Then you can command excel to take that and split between 4 people, let’s call those 4 the sellers of the items. The amount of possibility’s using multi part formulas is about as far as your imaginations will stretch, some people have even made entire video games using excel macro’s.

What I’m really trying to get at is free training is free training and should not be turned down to impress your new employers. Especially when dealing with something as complicated as Microsoft Excel. Please click here for further information on excel training courses.