Most of us work with Microsoft Excel – budgets, payroll, asset registers, job costing, whatever; you name it, you can do it in Excel. And, let’s face it, it’s a beast!
So how can we work with it better, and more importantly, make it more effective, report your stuff better, and more? It’s not a case of just Googling or knowing the shortcuts, formulas and features. You need an ‘approach’ to managing your data and to reporting; you need to step back and plan what you want first; you need to actually think about if first.
Here are some major questions to ask yourself about how to use Excel more effectively:
- What report(s) do you need to create, and what data are you starting with?
- Do you create different reports for different people from the same data?
- What Excel features can you combine to produce those reports – examples: ‘cell range names’ with ‘pivottables’ with ‘macros’, etc?
- How can you make the report user-friendly?
- How can you automate your workflow to save time with all this?
Asking these and other similar questions will help you see outside the ‘quagmire’ of what you’re trying to achieve. So, ‘forget about’ the tool at least temporarily, and work out what you need to achieve. The ‘how’ will (hopefully and easily) flow from there!
Have a look at what we cover in our Excel training courses here, and dates for face-to-face and online training are here.
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