US The Main Uses of Microsoft Excel a Software Application Discussion

Response 2: Sunil Kumar Uday Shankar

Discussion

COLLAPSE

Excel is a software application developed by Microsoft in 1985. It is increasingly used by companies that need to create, store, and make graphs, statistical data calculations, and the creation of formulas. Originally Excel was a DOS program. Excel was then released for Mac because of its graphical interface; due to its unquestionable versatility, Excel is the most widely used software application in all the business today (Frownfelter-Lohrke, 2017). Microsoft Excel in business gives business professionals context for the importance of developing competencies in Excel. As one of the most widely used computer software programs for business today, Excel is an important skill for all business professionals. Working knowledge of Excel is vital for most office-based professionals today, and the stronger the Excel skills have can open more opportunities (Frownfelter-Lohrke, 2017).

The three primary reasons why Excel is used in the business can be used as an analysis tool; for instance, if an organization or business plans to budget, many companies, from big corporations to small organizations, use Excel for budgeting purposes. Research suggests that 70 to 80% of all businesses use Excel as their primary budgeting tool. Excel is a great analytical tool for business, from pivot tables to what-if analysis. The advantage over its competitors is that it is readily available to most business organizations (Sharda et al., 2020). Second, in Data Management, Excel is commonly used to manage records further. Excel provides many functions in a formula that will not only help manage data or records but also helps analyze data based on changing business environments; through the use of Excel formulas, one can create comprehensive drop-down boxes to facilitate data inputs and reduce erroneous entries, and through the use of pivot tables, we can get a well-detailed analysis of stock movement or inventory level at any point of time. The third is that Excel is used in Problem-solving for calculations such as addition, subtraction, division, and multiplication (Jannach & Schmitz, 2016).

References

Frownfelter-Lohrke, C. (2017). Teaching good Excel design and skills: A three spreadsheet assignment project. Journal of Accounting Education, 39, 68-83.

Jannach, D., & Schmitz, T. (2016). Model-based diagnosis of spreadsheet programs: a constraint-based debugging approach. Automated Software Engineering, 23(1), 105-144.

Sharda, R., Delen, Dursun, and Turban, E. (2020). Analytics, Data Science, & Artificial Intelligence: Systems for Decision Support. 11th Edition. By PEARSON Education. Inc.