What Are Some Applications for Excel Workbooks & Worksheets?
Microsoft has been publishing its spreadsheet software, Excel, for a number of years. As new versions are released (now only as part of the Office Suite), Excel has been upgraded with new tools and options. With its powerful calculation tools and a wide array of formatting options, Microsoft Excel allows users of different skill levels to create spreadsheets and workbooks to use in budgets, accounting, graphs and data applications.
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Budget Sheets
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Budget sheets are one of the most popular applications for Microsoft Excel. Planning and recording budgets is easy with Excel's tools for formatting, color coding and calculation. Formatting tools will help you change your fonts, line spaces, and even cell orientation, allowing you to read clearly the sections of a budget sheet. Color-coding tools will change cell colors as well as borders, also increasing the visual impact and readability of your project. Calculation tools such as sum and averages are also helpful when you extract data to draw conclusions about your budget.
Accounting Journals and Ledgers
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Excel's cells and linking abilities provide the perfect format to create accounting journals and ledgers. Excel allows you to link cells from different worksheets so every change recorded in your journal updates the matching ledger immediately, saving valuable time. Balancing accounting ledgers is also expedited by using Excel's mathematical functions to calculate totals and differences. Given Excel's popularity, many free accounting templates are available online (see Resources).
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Graphs and Reports
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Excel allows you to generate various graphs, pie charts, XY scatters, bar graphs and histograms. Excel's linking feature lets you pull data from different worksheets in order to create reports that update instantly as data is entered or modified.
Data Sort and Format
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Data management can be time-consuming because of the amount of data to process, sort and evaluate. Excel's Sort feature allows you to sort data or arrays of data using up to three keys of relevance, or criteria. Excel's text handling functions (to compare, find and match text) allow for data manipulation. Formatting functions also let you correct mistyped data and make your data set uniform.
Form Templates
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Excel is also an excellent option to create fillable forms. Creating forms in Word can be difficult and time-consuming. Excel's cell arrangement offers the perfect solution to create text boxes (by adding borders to the cells) and place multiple data entries on the same line, all without changing margins.
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References
Resources
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