4 Critical Excel Skills All Managers and Executives Should Have

Knowing all the Excel functions and formulas does not make one an expert Excel user. As is so often seen, many Excel users who claim to know everything about Excel still spend a lot of time on their spreadsheets. And sadly, they don’t even know that the time they spend on their Excel tasks can be significantly reduced. If you really want to master Excel and save time on your Excel spreadsheets, you must possess the following four critical Excel skills.

1. data processing
2. data consolidation
3. Reports
4. Analysis

This is why:-

data processing

Learning to process data is a critical skill that all managers and executives must have. Implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system takes at least two years. By the time it goes live, the business environment will have changed. Data from the ERP system would have helped, but needs additional processing by the manager or executive. Without knowing how to process the data efficiently, your manager or executive would have to spend hours manually changing the formula to get the desired result, wasting valuable time and resources in the process.

Consider the following example where your manager or executive has to extract part of the description from column B. Without the ability to process the data, your manager or executive would have to spend hours manually changing the formula in the row to extract the description from the column B. variable-length industry class.

But if you have acquired the skills to process the data, you only need to copy the formula and get the results in seconds.

data consolidation

In an ideal business environment, companies should use only one ERP system across all business functions. Unfortunately, this has never been the case. Each business function would purchase a system that is best suited to them. As a result, managers and executives have to consolidate from multiple data sources (ERP systems). Microsoft® Excel, being a versatile tool, is often used for consolidation. However, without the ability to consolidate data, managers and executives have to resort to copying and pasting data from one spreadsheet to another for thousands of rows of data. Unless you are properly trained in data consolidation, you will not be able to perform consolidation quickly and accurately.

Reports

With the advancement of technologies, more and more data is being captured and made available for decision making. As a result, managers and executives are working with more queues than ever before. If the manager or executive is not adept at summarizing data with Excel, he or she would have to spend hours manually going through rows of data to tabulate numbers for reports. Learning the secret to summarizing data with Excel would save those precious extra hours and generate a highly accurate report for submission.

Data analysis

In today’s ever-changing business environment, managers and executives are expected to regularly offer new insights about the business. Existing reports are unlikely to help managers and executives spot new trends as soon as they appear. Knowing Excel formulas and functions is not enough to get the job done. Managers and executives need to know how to analyze data to help them identify patterns and trends. This can only be achieved if they possess the latest critical Excel skills: data analysis.