I myself am a competent user of Excel. I use it for financial analysis and other things that require the manipulation of numbers. It has a variety of features and functions, which can assist business organizations and people generally.

Let us suppose for one moment, that you do not use Excel for financial analysis. In relation to your own financial matters and circumstances you may only be left with a monthly bank statement. This on its own will not tell you much, besides your final monthly bank balance and some expense details. On the whole, fairly limited.

However, if you were to take these bank statements and then enter the details contained into an annual cash-forecast, within an Excel file, you will be able to see a whole lot more. A cash flow forecast will show you your monthly expense totals for each category and then display a total monthly figure in addition to the final overall monthly balance. These can then be compared with previous month totals and also, perhaps more importantly, the spreadsheet can show your total figures annually if set-up to do so. Cash-flow statements are usually used as a budgeting tool and as such your ability to plan financially will be greatly enhanced, whether on a personal or business level.

I myself have done this, with additional extras. For example, I have set the sheet up so that overall average monthly and daily expenses are calculated. And also, that percentage spending in relation to income is calculated.

Excel's graphical capabilities can of course be incorporated into the sheet. With a wide variety of graphs which can be used to display numbers and data in a whole new way. Pie charts for percentage shares; bar graphs for comparing qualitative totals; Line graphs, or scatter graphs can be used to display and compare numerical correlation. From a business perspective, the stock graph can be used to analyze companies' stock values.

Business organizations will invariably make greater demands of the software than individual users. Excel is an option along with other software applications tailored to the market, and bespoke (in-house) software packages. I cannot comment on alternative packages, as I have never used them. However, it should be noted that Excel is the leader in the market and as such does set a benchmark.

With its reporting tools in addition to goal-seek, scenario based calculations and a range of mathematical functions, it surely has enough to provide for most business demands (except perhaps databases which is dealt with within specialist packages). The pivot-tables can be used to generate good quality business reports for financial comparison; and goal-seek, along with it's scenario based features, give organizations a lot of scope to make financial projections and budget amendments.

The range of functions is endless, from maths and trig, to statistics, look up and reference. Complicated formulas can be created. Evidently, the financial functions are the most useful in relation to financial analysis. You can do things like interest rate calculations and asset depreciation, which is useful for balance sheets.

Data linking is also a useful feature, which can enable business to link data into the spreadsheet from other sources. Be it web-based, or database queries.

What more can be said? Overall Excel is a strong financial tool for numerical handling generally. With effective use, business organizations and people generally can gain great advantages in using it in relation to financial analysis.

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