No matter what your occupation, learning to use Microsoft Excel can be good for your career and your future job prospects. A wide range of occupations use Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, including accountants, supervisors across a wide sector of jobs and business analysts. If your career aspirations run in that direction, teaching yourself to use Excel can be a big boon to your future opportunities.
Administrative assistants, secretaries and other administrative staff members use Excel spreadsheets for a variety of purposes, including to create training schedules and tracking sick and vacation time within the department. Administrative assistants may also use Excel spreadsheets to design sign-in sheets for the reception desk or sign-out sheets for keeping track of company property. Administrative assistants and secretaries are often responsible for designing, updating and maintaining spreadsheets for their managers and supervisors as well.
Business analysts use Excel spreadsheets to build comprehensive budgets for their departments and their companies. Those business analysts may also use the graphing features of Microsoft Excel to build charts to use in presentations for shareholders, customers and internal clients. Business analysts use Excel spreadsheets to create predictive models that take existing data and project it out to future quarters and future years.
Accountant and CPAs use Excel spreadsheets to build budgets and other financial documents for their clients. Accountants may also use Excel spreadsheets to analyze the tax situations of their clients and help them make decisions that will lower their tax liabilities and help them make the most of their finances.
The manager of a department may use Excel spreadsheets to keep track of employees. For instance, a department head could design a spreadsheet that automatically calculates the amount of sick and vacation time remaining each time new data is entered. That makes it easier for the manager to see which employees are running low on vacation time, and which ones may need counseling about the excessive use of sick time. A company manager can also use an Excel spreadsheet to track wages for each employee and calculate average raises and merit increases for the department.