Microsoft Excel used to be something you only needed to know if you wanted to work in financial planning, as an accountant, or something similar.
Today, however, to function effectively in society and take care of your personal requirements as well as those of your family, it has become crucial to know how to MIcrosoft Excel or Google Sheets.
Below are the top reasons why everyone should learn Excel in the digital age.
Save time and make better decisions
With more and more aspects of our lives being stored online, Excel has become a go-to tool for analyzing information. Not only can it help you sort through large sets of data, but it’s also an extremely flexible tool that allows you to create formulas and charts from scratch.
You might have to spend time learning how to use Excel’s features, but its efficiency will quickly make up for any time lost. If you’re not using Excel at work, consider taking a class or signing up for one of many free tutorials available online.
Become more valuable as an employee
Before Excel, people used to manually calculate numbers on a calculator—and that was only if they were lucky enough to have access to one. But now, Excel has practically become ubiquitous in offices. And while using spreadsheets has its pros and cons (e.g., they’re a lot more flexible than databases), one huge pro is that knowing how to make them can make you so much more valuable as an employee.
Knowing how to use data analysis tools is definitely something you want on your resume! Not convinced? Check out Microsoft’s extensive list of potential career paths for both entry-level and experienced users of its products. Just about every industry relies on computer applications like Office and therefore there are more job opportunities than you might think for Excel experts.
Improve your self-confidence by learning a complex tool
Believe it or not, there’s a lot of power in knowing how to master new skills. According to Josh Kaufman, author of The Personal MBA, self-confidence can be broken down into two components: capability and choice. We gain confidence from seeing that we’re capable (or competent) at doing something and that we have a choice about whether or not to do it.
So if you learn how to use Excel—or any other complex tool—you can gain self-confidence by understanding both your capabilities and your choices. For example, you’ll realize that you’re capable of using Excel; so if someone asks you for help with spreadsheets (which they will), you’ll feel confident saying yes instead of frantically searching for another way out.
Save money on accounting services
Most companies can handle their own accounting, with a little help from Excel. Many small businesses and startups do all of their record-keeping on spreadsheets, though most of them only use it for simple record-keeping—which, admittedly, is still valuable.
With just a few basic functions and techniques at your disposal, you can significantly boost your spreadsheet’s usefulness and make life much easier for yourself when it comes to getting organized and staying on top of expenses. If you’re not sure where to start or how to use Excel for your accounting needs, here are some tips that will get you started.
Unlock business opportunities you couldn’t have dreamed of before
From monitoring social media mentions to analyzing website traffic, Excel can do it all. In fact, many people don’t realize just how powerful Excel can be—it can automate repetitive tasks and help you gain insights into business issues that would have taken you hours to find manually.
Want to know what portion of your revenue comes from a specific product? What time of day do you get more page views? Which channels are performing best for your campaigns? That’s just scratching the surface of what Excel can do—and there are entire books on how to get started with it.
Conclusion:
We hope this article has helped you understand why it is important for everyone to learn Excel. If you want to learn more about Excel, you can always learn for free on youtube. There are thousands of Excel tutorials on YouTube. Use Career Ninja‘s LearnTube platform for hand-holding training on YouTube. Learn Tube organizes the results of your YouTube search into a course framework. If you want to learn “Excel tutorials”, search the term on LearnTube and it will show you a bunch of youtube videos like an online course. As a beginner, you’ll click through the videos from the first to the last, as if you were taking an online course tailored specifically for you.
