IS EXCEL A SKILL REQUIRED NOW-A-DAYS?
This question I get from students, whom I have been teaching and they find Excel to be a software which is specially designed for accounting purposes or managers preparing their reports. To answer this query, I surveyed and observed many multi-national companies and startups who come to campuses for placements for professionals, and the answer was that Excel skills was one of the criteria.
Hence, considering the importance of it, below are top 5 excel functions a professional or student must know for standing out in the workplace or being sought after.
1. Conditional formatting: One of the tools of Excel to visualize the data in your spreadsheet. Based on the condition put, you can colourfully create patterns dynamically whether it is cell background or cell value, duplicate or unique values.
2. Pivot Tables/Charts: Another powerful feature provided by Excel, helpful in summarizing large amounts of data ie. Extract the significant characteristics from the dataset and present to the user. It could be in the form of graph or chart or dashboard.
3. Macros: A tool to automate your work on Excel. A user can record his set of actions which are repeatedly done in a worksheet and run the same, whenever required.
4. What-if analysis: The name is self-explanatory ie. What happens to the predicted value if given an observed value with formula in a worksheet. It helps users to take decisions because of the features it has like Scenarios, Forecasting, resource allocation, Risk assessment etc.
5. Lookup Functions: One of the popular and most used functions of Excel, the Vlookup and Hlookup functions are used to locate and display the data available in the current sheet or another worksheet or workbook.
Excel is not limited to the above functions mentioned, it has a powerful array of functions useful for professionals in any domain. The importance of it hence lies here. The software Excel has found its place for any kind of analysis if we think of statistical analysis, numerical analysis etc. We think of the package as for only small business purposes, but in actual terms it has much more to benefit students, professionals, managers, financial analysts etc. Any area of management like Human Resource, Marketing, Finance, Production, Operations can be utilizing the features of Excel for preparing basic to advanced charts, formatting the data, presenting the analysis over different worksheets by filtering, sorting, automate the tasks, templates to be used for various purposes etc. We can work on Excel sheets over Gmail as Sheets and hence can work offline or online.
Hence to leave a mark as a skilled professional from campus to corporate or as an entrepreneur, Excel expertise is important.
JIMS Engineering & Management Technical Campus, Greater Noida provides an extensive learning to students wherein apart from their core curriculum subjects, skill learning sessions on variety of topics are imparted on a regular basis so that the students are benefitted from the same for their bright future ahead.
By:
Ms. Preeta Rajiv Sivaraman
Assistant Professor
JIMS, Greater Noida
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