Essential Excel Skills for Business

When it comes to modern businesses, the demand for efficient and productive tools is more important than ever. Business professionals face the challenge of managing, analysing, and presenting data from various sources and formats. Without the right Excel Skills for Business, this can lead to wasted time, errors, and missed opportunities.

This blog explores the essential Excel Skills for Business which can help you achieve your business goals. Whether a beginner or an expert, you will find the best Excel Skills for your needs, along with examples, tips, and benefits. Let’s dive in to learn more!

Table of Contents

1) What are Excel Skills for Business? 

2) What will you gain from learning Excel Skills for Business? 

3) 12+ Excel Skills for Business professionals 

      a) Data validation

      b) Data consolidation

      c) Data filters

      d) Statistical Analysis

      e) Data selection

      f) Data sorting

      g) VLOOKUP

      h) HLOOKUP

      i) Power View

      j) Flash Fill

4) Conclusion

What are Excel Skills for Business?

Excel Skills assist you in performing complex calculations and simulations, storing and analysing data, and Data Visualisation and automation. One of Excel's key advantages is that it has a spreadsheet to organise your data cleanly and a tonne of other tools, formulas, and MS Excel shortcuts that make handling data simple and stress-free. 

Learning Advanced Excel Skills will make you a master at handling massive volumes of data and filtering out valuable insights for the business. You can use these skills to manage a number of tasks effectively with just a few clicks.   

Excel will help you with inventory management, team management, time and cost estimation and tracking various activities. You will be considered an asset to the company as a professional with excellent professional skills.

What will you gain from learning Excel Skills for Business?

From a student in university to an employee in an organisation, everyone uses Excel to complete their tasks. You can perform several tasks efficiently with the help of this super powerful tool – Excel. Excel provides you with several tools and applications for Data Visualisation and provides crucial business insights. Excel will help you with the following: 

a) Balance sheets 

b) Editorial calendars 

c) Data Visualisation

d) Data Analysis  

e) Finance analysis 

f) Data calculators 

g) Business Analysis 

h) Cost analysis 

I) Market analysis 

j) Project Management 

k) Expense tracking 

l) Inventory tracking and many more 

If you find performing any of the above tasks challenging, you must start learning the primary Excel Skills mentioned below. These skills will reduce the time you spend on these tasks, and you can complete complex computations in just a few seconds.

12+ Excel Skills for Business professionals

Now that we know the importance of Excel Skills and how they can help make our lives easier. Let's see where you can start – learn the skill mentioned to give a kickstart to your excellence in Excel:

1) Data validation 

Data validation is used to control what you can enter in particular cells. It is also used to detect any errors in the data and help you make any necessary corrections. You can include numerical limits that will ensure that you do not enter incorrect numbers or even ensure that a particular date falls within a defined time period.

Data validation is a valuable tool to control user input into the spreadsheet. Data validation is frequently used to format numbers, implement custom rules, and convert cells into drop-down lists. You can employ data validation for functions like: 

a) Autocorrection 

b) List integration 

c) Spell check 

d) Duplicate entry indication 

e) Credential verification 

f) Custom filtering 

g) To protect your sheet  

h) Locking cells 

I) Drop-down selections 

2) Data consolidation  

If the data are organised similarly, Excel's built-in data consolidation tool allows you to integrate large amounts of data. Information can be streamlined, and lists can be added using this feature. For instance, a Content Writing team can utilise the consolidation feature to regularly integrate a list of recently written blogs with a list of existing blogs. 

3) Data filters

Some people may think that working with data filters is a very basic Excel ability. However, if you want to stand out from the competition, you'll need to learn how to use data filters. When you understand how to use data filters, you can quickly sort, hide, and search particular information in the spreadsheet. 

 4) Statistical Analysis

There are special tools in Excel to assist you in crunching the data if you are working with statistics. Features include generating random numbers, histogram construction, and establishing a correlation between data sets. You no longer have to worry about completing manual calculations or fixing human mistakes because Excel does that work for you. 

5) Data selection

Excel provides multiple data selection tools like Pivot Tables and filters for selecting data. You can display specific areas of the spreadsheet that you want to work with using these options. When working with vast amounts of data, data selection helps to minimise the possibility of errors and distracting elements. For instance, a retailer may want to filter and view only those items sold in his store above a specific price point. 

6) Data sorting 

You can sort any kind of data in Excel into whatever order you like. For example, in alphabetical or numerical order or even reverse alphabetical order. This is a challenging skill to perfect because there are times when you might sort one row or column but not another, messing up a spreadsheet. Because of these complex operations, learning these skills is essential.

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7) VLOOKUP

Anyone who uses Excel should be proficient with VLOOKUP. VLOOKUP in Excel enables you to combine data from various sheets and workbooks into one place, which is ideal for making reports. Data Analysts are in high demand right now, so having this Excel ability is essential for them, but it's also helpful to everyone.

8) HLOOKUP

The "horizontal lookup" charting tool performs the same functions as a VLOOKUP, except for data tables containing row headers. It delivers a corresponding value for a given row rather than returning a corresponding value for a defined column like in VLOOKUP. 

9) Power View

Power View is a data exploration and visualisation technology that helps create interactive charts, graphs, maps, and other visuals that aid in bringing data to life. Such interactive entities are built by pulling and analysing large quantities of data from external files. This serves as an essential and handy Excel Skill. Power View has the ability to build interactive presentation-ready reports that can be easily exported to PowerPoint presentations.

10) Flash Fill

In Excel, the Flash Fill has the ability to fill out information much more quickly than typing it individually. As a result, this saves a lot of time and makes things less stressful. If one is working as a full-time analyst in an organisation, having this skill will save a lot of time as one would be working with a massive amount of data most of the time. 

11) Pivot Tables

A Pivot Table in Excel is an interactive way of summarising a large amount of data in Excel. One can use a Pivot Table to analyse numerical data in detail, like performing sums, counting, and finding averages. 

Based on this analysis, one can also answer some unanticipated questions about the data. The usefulness of Pivot Table lies in the fact that it is specially designed for performing queries of large amounts of data in many user-friendly ways.

If one understands the usability and the know-how of Pivot Table, it becomes easier to compress data and create reports that the business needs.

12) SUMIF/SUMIFS

SUMIF/SUMIFS in Excel is a function that sums the values occurring in a range and which also meets the criteria that one specifies. This criterion includes such as dates, text, and numbers. It’s a way of sorting through data present on a spreadsheet efficiently.

The function SUMIF has the following arguments-

a) Range: It is a required field. The range of cells that one wants is evaluated by criteria. Criteria evaluate the range of cells that one wants. The cells in each range must contain numbers or names, arrays or references which contain numbers. Text values and Blanks are generally ignored. The selected range contains dates in standard Excel format.

c) Criteria: It is a required field. The criteria can be a number, expression, cell reference, text, or a function that defines which cells will have to be added. Wildcard characters like a question mark (?) to match any single character and an asterisk (*) to match any sequence of characters can also be included.

13) COUNTIF/COUNTIFS

COUNTIF/COUNTIFS in Microsoft Excel is a function that counts the number of cells in a range such that these cells meet single or multiple criteria. One can use COUNTIFS as a worksheet function, where they can be entered as a formula in the cell of a worksheet.

14) Excel shortcut keys

When one works with Excel in any organisation, one can get their work done much more quickly if one learns to use the shortcut keys. There exists a variety of keys that can be used directly from the keyboard rather than depending on the mouse to navigate.

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Conclusion 

If you have come all the way here, you should know why Excel is essential and its importance for your career. To be a pro in Excel and work in any professional organisation, you need to master the above-discussed Excel Skills for Business. You can also take Excel training courses to help you master these and many more Excel Skills.

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