- Doing business accounting is a common Excel project.number background image by kuhar from Fotolia.com
As businesses have asked for features in Excel, Microsoft has added them. Putting those features into their proper context works best with Excel projects--that is, learning how to do specific jobs that use Excel functions (the parts of Excel that do mathematical and other operations) and features (such as data validation and conditional formatting) to do something specific. - To use Excel as an accounting program, the basic tools on hand are the SUM() and SUMIF() functions, which can be used to get running totals of expenses and income and to sum only financial transactions that meet some other criterion, such as sales by employee number or sales by calendar quarter. Conditional formatting tools can be used to highlight negative results or results that meet particular criteria, such as increases by a fixed percentage or the largest or smallest value in a column or row.
- Excel has several database-like abilities, ranging from column sorting to being able to extract information out of a range of cells using assorted look-up and indexing functions. Using Excel as a database is a common Excel project in both home and office--for example, for tracking work orders or organizing a CD collection. Excel's sorting tools are the real winners here, allowing you to enter new data at the end of the list and re-sort everything alphabetically, by date or by employee name. Additional functions that can be useful include the INDEX() and MATCH() functions, along with data validation, to build queries to find specific items within a range of cells.
- Excel has a number of date and time functions, allowing it to be used as an automatic time sheet. These can then be linked with a basic rate of pay to help calculate the payroll for a small business. It won't be as robust a solution as a dedicated time-sheet management program, but the DATE() and TIME() functions, once learned, are more than good enough for businesses with fewer than about 20 employees. This is also useful for invoicing for billable hours or billable minutes for office work, such as legal advice or transcription.
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