Excel - An Important Analytics Tool in Corporate Environment

In recent surveys which have been conducted around the world, it has been concluded that Analytics is one area where organisations are going to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Gathering information from raw data with the use of analytics and taking informed decisions based on that information is the way forward for most of the organisations in today's times. For this purpose, organisation make use of several tools.

Excel is one of them. Excel is widely used in most of the organisations. Be it a small startup company or a major MNC all organisations in today's times use Excel. It might seem like a basic tool for conducting data analysis, but people who know how to make in depth use of Excel can gather immense information with the use of this tool. There are several options in Excel like goal seek scenario, Pivot tables, What if analysis which can be used to create multiple scenarios from a given set of data to aid decision making. Apart from these, there are functions which are inbuilt in excel such as financial, statistical and several others which can be used to perform quick analysis in just a matter of minutes. Excel has several chart options such as Pie Chart, Bar Chart etc. These charts can be used for Trend analysis, or looking at Company's market share vis-a-vis its competitors or its performance for a particular product or in a particular region. One can use a line chart to look at the Trend analysis as to how the company has been performing over a period of time.

Bar charts can be used to make comparisons. Then there are advanced filters which can be used to filter out only information which meets a particular criteria or to extract information meeting specific criteria from raw data. There are financial functions which can help quickly arrive at EMIs or loan Prepayments or arriving at the Internal Rate of Return on Investments. These financial functions can also be utilised to arrive at the Net Present Value of investments or arriving at the yield. The possibilities are endless.

In view of the above, there are several educational institutes, training institutes, coaching classes who provide a variety of training courses in Excel. They provide Excel training both as online trainings or classroom trainings. Executive across the world know that in the absence of knowledge of Excel they could be left behind and are signing up for these courses to upgrade their skills and knowledge.