How Using Excel Can Improve Business Productivity

There are many simple business tasks that can be accomplished using a basic spreadsheet that take much longer using pen and paper. Even a ledger page with columns and rows laid out in a grid isn’t so usable when needing to white-out mistakes or wanting to insert a row between two completed ones and being unable to do so.

Learning a few useful tricks with Excel can increase your productivity in the office and help you move faster. Here are a few simple Excel tips to begin improving your skill-set using this software.

1. Sum the Total of a Column of Numbers

Highlight a column of numbers and press the ALT and + symbol on the keyboard to create a sum of the highlighted column of numbers. There is also a sum button in the toolbar that can be used.

2. Use Auto-Fill

Use the auto-fill series to let Excel automatically complete the next item(s) in the sequence. This can be entered manually or by copying and pasting in a column or row of cells. The software can iterate through the sequence, i.e. Monday and Tuesday can be entered, and then with the copying process Excel can complete the remaining days of the week for you. A great time saver.

3. Freeze Panes

Create a frozen pane on the spreadsheet so that you can see two areas of the same sheet side-by-side. This is useful when wanting to compare two pieces of information located in different areas on the same sheet but not wanting to copy and paste. For instance, a heading with the month and year can be frozen in place at the top of the page so that when scrolling down this information is not hidden from view. This feature has been included in the software since Microsoft Excel 2007.

4. Change the Sheet Names

When Excel creates a new spreadsheet, it typically opens up 3 sheets named Sheet 1, Sheet 2, and Sheet 3. Rename each sheet to the most relevant descriptive name and delete sheets that are not needed to keep the spreadsheet file small.

5. Keyboard Shortcuts Save Time

Needing to hunt through the myriad of buttons in the ribbon UI to find the feature you need can really stop you in your tracks. It can be easier to learn (or even just write down on a small notepad) some useful keyboard shortcuts that work in Excel like F7 to activate the spell checker.

6. Learning Excel Functions

While learning Excel functions, which are used to make calculations inside a spreadsheet cell, seems a bit daunting at first, they can save you a lot of time. It is not necessary to learn them all, but everything from SUM to calculate the total of a group of numbers to PROPER to capitalise the first letter of each word in a cell, can be very useful. Try to learn and use one new Excel function each day to build up some experience with them.

Learning Excel isn’t actually that difficult. You do not need to know everything about the software to considerably boost your efficiency in the workplace. Significant productivity gains can be achieved just by becoming more organised by using some of Excel’s more advanced features.