Excel is perhaps the most important computer program used in the workplace today. That’s why so many workers and potential employees must learn Excel to enter or stay in the workplace.

From the businessperson’s point of view, particularly in the field of information systems, the use of Excel as an end-user computing tool is essential. Many business professionals not only use Excel to perform day-to-day functional tasks in the workplace, but an increasing number of employers rely on Excel for decision making.

Overall, Excel dominates the spreadsheet products industry with an estimated 90 percent market share. Excel 2007 supports spreadsheets with up to one million rows by 16,000 columns, allowing the user to import and work with massive amounts of data and achieve faster calculation performance than ever before.

Outside of the workplace, Excel is widely used for solving everyday problems.

Let’s say you have a home office. You can use Excel to calculate sales tax on a purchase, calculate the cost of a car trip, create a temperature converter, calculate the price of pizza per square inch, and analyze the data entered. You can track your debt, income, and assets, determine your debt-to-income ratio, calculate your net worth, and use this information to prepare for the mortgage application process for a new home. The personal uses of Excel are almost as endless as the business uses of this software, and an Excel tutorial delves into the practical uses of the program for personal and business use.

The use of spreadsheets on computers is not new. Spreadsheets, in electronic form, have been around since before the introduction of the personal computer. The precursors to Excel and Lotus 1-2-3 were packages like VisiCalc, developed and modeled on the financial ledger. Since 1987, spreadsheet programs have had an impact on the business world. Along the way, computerized spreadsheets have become a widespread and increasingly effective tool for comparative data analysis around the world.

Today, end users use Excel to create and modify spreadsheets, as well as create web pages with links and complex formatting specifications. They create macros and scripts. While some of these programs are small one-time calculations, many are much more critical, affecting financial decisions and important business transactions.

Widely used by businesses, service agencies, volunteer groups, private sector organizations, scientists, students, educators, trainers, researchers, journalists, accountants, and others, Microsoft Excel has become a staple for end users and business professionals.

The beauty of Excel is that it can be used as a receiver of workplace or business data, or as a calculator, decision support tool, data converter, or even as a spreadsheet for information interpretation. Excel can create a chart or graph, work in conjunction with mail merge functions, import data from the Internet, create a mind map, and rank information sequentially by importance.

Excel offers new data analysis and visualization tools that help you analyze information, spot trends, and access information more easily than in the past. By using conditional formatting with rich data visualization schemes, you can assess and illustrate important trends and highlight exceptions with color gradients, data bars, and icons.

In fact, Excel can be customized to perform such a wide variety of functions that many businesses cannot operate without it. Excel training has become mandatory in many workplaces; in fact, computer software training is a must for any workplace trying to keep up.

Let’s say you are an employer with 97 workers, 17 of whom called in sick today, and you want to know the percentage absenteeism represents. Excel can do that. You can learn Excel and use it to determine the ratio of male to female employees, the percentage of minorities on the payroll, and the rank of each worker by compensation package amount, including percentages of that package based on salary and benefits. You can use Excel to track production by department, information that can help you with future development plans. You can create additional spreadsheets to track data about vendors and customers while maintaining an ongoing inventory of product stock.

Let’s say you want to know your business output versus cost. You don’t have to be a math wizard, you just have to learn Excel. Excel lets you input all the data, analyze it, sort it according to your custom format, and display the results with color, shading, backgrounds, icons, and other tricks that offer time-saving assistance in pinpointing the precise information you want later. If this spreadsheet is for presentation purposes, Excel helps you put it together in such a visually appealing way that the data can appear flashy and shiny.

The most important thing an employer can do is learn Excel – it is one of the most essential tools in the workplace.

Excel and Microsoft are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation, registered in the US and other countries. Lotus is a registered trademark of International Business Machines Corporation in the US and/or other countries.