While you may think that Excel is used by accountants and bookkeepers, there are actually many other jobs that use Excel. While it is certainly used in financial jobs, you are just as likely to find Excel being used to help a marketer organize a customer list, or a sales professional keep track of leads, and project managers use Excel to keep tasks on-track by monitoring roles, responsibilities and assigned work. Here are some of the many jobs that use Excel:
Financial Analysts use Excel
Financial analysts use Excel for creating financial models, analyzing data, and preparing reports that help business leaders to make decisions informed by data. Excel is the tool of choice for financial analysts who create detailed financial models, perform valuation analyses, and need to forecast financial performance. With many automatic calculations, built-in functions, and capabilities to slice and dice data it provides for better insights. In short, Excel helps analysts make better informed decisions.
Accountants use Excel
Accountants use Excel to create financial statements and perform cost analysis. Excel helps with budgeting, reconciling financial statements, and analyzing cash flows as it presents data in a neat and orderly manner. Complex calculations, conditional formatting for highlighting discrepancies and changes in data, and options for visualizing trends through charts and graphs is invaluable for bookkeepers and accountants.
Data Analysts use Excel
Data analysts sort and organize data as part of their daily routine. They rely on Excel to clean, transform, and analyze data, including using functions, formulas, and filters. Excel serves as the primary foundational tool for data analysts who also work with databases and manipulate data programmatically using R and Python to perform basic statistical analyses. Excel's pivot tables make it possible for data analysts to efficiently summarize and aggregate data.
Project Managers use Excel
Project managers track project timelines, budgets, responsibilities, and resources with Excel. Whether using Gantt charts for project planning and tracking project progress, or a traditional list view to show assignments and budgets, Excel has many capabilities for organizing projects. Conditional formatting also helps highlight tasks that may be behind schedule, and graphs can show project milestones and progress.
Sales and marketing professionals use Excel
Those working in sales and marketing roles use Excel for managing customer lists, tracking leads, and analyzing sales trends. Sales professionals use Excel as a simple database of customers or sales leads, and monitor sales and profitability. Marketing professionals use Excel for marketing projects, including client lists, product lists, and performing segmentation. Excel is also used in concert with tools like Google Analytics to monitor the effectiveness of campaigns.
Human Resources Specialists use Excel
HR specialists use Excel for managing employee lists, benefits, claims management, payroll, and reporting. With capabilities for sorting and filtering, HR professionals rely on Excel to keep employee data organized.
Supply Chain Managers use Excel
Whether conducting inventory tracking, demand forecasting, or optimizing logistics, supply chain managers use Excel in their day-to-day work. Excel's data analysis tools make it easier to identify trends and improve efficiency within a supply chain.
Researchers use Excel
Researchers, whether social scientists, UX researchers, or in the natural sciences, use Excel to organize and analyze data. Researchers need to create tables for publications, and visualize trends to show their findings, and Excel helps with these tasks. Whether organizing, analyzing, or sharing data, Excel is helpful for researchers of all types.
Administrative Assistant use Excel
Administrative professionals use Excel for data entry, scheduling, managing expense reports, and organizing data. Using Excel’s functions to require specific data inputs, calculate totals, and automatically format data based upon information that is entered, Excel can make the job of an administrative professional easier.
Educators use Excel
Educators both in the classroom and in administrative roles use Excel to organize student attendance, homework, projects, and grades. Using Excel's formulas, grades can be calculated and updated automatically as new information is entered, and mean and median grades across an entire class of students.
Across a range of jobs, Excel helps professionals manage data, ease data entry, create budgets, perform financial analysis, generate reports, create charts and graphs to visualize data, and automate data formatting and calculations. Excel courses help employees gain practical skills that are transferable to many professions. Because it is such a versatile data management tool, Excel is indispensable for many jobs.