Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application that has been around for over two decades, and as such has become the leader in its field and in fact, is considered the de-facto standard for software of its kind. Many people believe that Excel became the standard because of Microsoft’s ability to crush its competition through clever and generally heavy-handed marketing techniques. And while this might be partly true, it’s also true that Microsoft simply made a better product than anyone else.
Today, Microsoft Excel is an application that virtually anyone can use because they’ve made it so user friendly, and yet, it’s still as powerful as it ever was, and perhaps in some ways, even more so.
The reason that people should consider learning to use Excel is because it is useful in so many ways.
The first is in budgeting of course, because it is a spreadsheet program first and foremost. Sheets can be easily created that clearly show income and expenditures and the bottom line. They can also display charts to show more easily where the money is coming in or where it’s going, and things can be tinkered with on the fly to help people figure out where they might save money, or spend less. In short, Excel allows even the most casual computer user to very easily create and maintain a personal budget.
But it can do much more. For example, it can be used by anyone that buys or sells stocks on their own through E*Trade, to help them watch and gauge their investment strategies or to assist them in choices they make in the future. Or they might use it to create a data sheet whereby the pull data off an online website that has information that they want on a regular bases. The sheet then crunches those numbers for them whenever they open their sheet, automatically.
Excel can also be used as a simple database, for use with CD’s for example, or for gathering all of the information about personal assets for use when filling out insurance forms or for estimating your net worth, or for helping to figure out how much life insurance you should buy. Or you could use it to calculate how much to put down on a house, or what your payments might be on a car you’re looking at. Excel makes doing all this kind of stuff easy and readily accessible.
It in knowing how to use Excel that makes all these things easy, because you have the knowledge in your head and can just sit down and have the results you are looking for in short order, because Excel is always there ready able and willing to do whatever it is you ask of it.