Question

Beyond stock control, describe 2 other possible uses for MS Excel in companies, from two other functional areas (e.g. finance, marketing, strategic management, production, CRM, HR, etc). Describe the data used in each particular area and give an example of how that data is used.

Answer 1

Uses of excel:

Finance and Accounting

Financial services and financial accounting are the areas of finance that rely on and benefit from Excel spreadsheets the most. In the 1970s and early 1980s, financial analysts would spend weeks running advanced formulas either manually or in programs like IBM's (NYSE: IBM) Lotus 1-2-3. Now, you can perform complex modeling in minutes with Excel.

Walk through the finance or accounting department of any major corporate office, and you will see computer screens filled with Excel spreadsheets crunching numbers, outlining financial results, and creating budgets, forecasts, and plans used to make major business decisions.

Marketing:

While marketing and product professionals look to their finance teams to do the heavy lifting for financial analysis, using spreadsheets to list customer and sales targets can help you manage your salesforce and plan future marketing strategies based on past results.

Using a pivot table, users can quickly and easily summarize customer and sales data by category with a quick drag-and-drop.

Human Resources

While database systems like Oracle (ORCL), SAP (SAP), and Quickbooks (INTU) can be used to manage payroll and employee information, exporting that data into Excel allows users to discover trends, summarize expenses and hours by pay period, month, or year, and better understand how your workforce is spread out by function or pay level.

HR professionals can use Excel to take a giant spreadsheet full of employee data and understand exactly where the costs are coming from and how to best plan and control them for the future.