3 Reasons why Your Small Business Office Needs Microsoft Excel Training

If your office staff isn't utilizing the full functionality of the Microsoft Office suite of products, you might be missing out on the true power of your data. Though your organization may be collecting large amounts of strategic data, without an innovative way to organize it to serve your custom business needs, the data itself is irrelevant.

By making maximum use of their collected data, Amazon was able to dominate the marketplace through highly intuitive product recommendations. While every online or physical store keeps sales records, it was Amazon's creative organization of their data that made all the difference. In this article, you'll find 3 ways that Excel training can improve your office productivity and bring new potential to your old data through custom built spreadsheet tools.

Excel Training Benefit #1: Pivot Tables

Every business has a great deal of information to keep organized. With so many different types of data, a single spreadsheet of information can become extremely cumbersome and downright confusing. Perhaps one of most beneficial skills your team will learn in Excel training is how to use pivot tables to organize information into manageable chunks and to access and compare data instantly.

After learning about pivot tables in Excel training, awkward rows and columns of data become information powerhouses. The great benefit of pivot tables is that they allow you to enter the information once but can return the data countless ways. After some Excel training, your team will be using pivot tables to quickly learn which products are hot sellers during specific time periods, which customers are buying what, understand patterns in buyer demographics, and much more.

Excel Training Benefit #2: Sales Tracking Tools

Great sales people have three main motivations: cash, competition, and recognition. If you create an office environment of friendly competition and offer attractive incentives, you've got a winning formula for growth. After just a few days of Excel training, you'll learn how to use the Excel graphing functions in ways you may have never thought possible, like to build an all inclusive sales dashboard. Excel is the ideal medium for creating custom sales tracking tools because every business has its own particular statistics to track in terms of sales.

With the advanced graphing knowledge learned in Excel training, sales managers can create an Excel document for your sales team to document their vital sale statistics such as number of inquiries, number of sales, sales by product, etc. You'll learn how to link this data to power a whole series of graphs and charts that instantly visually displays productivity, sales percentages by product, percentage of leads that become sales, and even equate the current sales to bonus dollars earned. With instant, up to the minute graphical data, sales associates can easily identify their strengths and weaknesses and compete with themselves and others to drive more sales.

Excel Training Benefit #3: Interactive Web Spreadsheets

Interactive tools such as loan calculators, bulk sales calculators, and investment growth prediction calculators that instantly update based on variables entered, attract visitors to your website and keep them interested once they are there. After just 3 days of Microsoft Excel training, you'll have all of the knowledge to create interactive web spreadsheets keep visitors coming back to your website.

The more users can interact with your website and extract quality information through tools like interactive calculators, the longer they will stay on your website. Just like in a physical environment, the longer a potential customer stays, the more likely they are to purchase your product or service. In terms of search engine ranking, interactive tools are priceless. Informative, interactive spreadsheet tools naturally encourage other sites to link to yours. The more sites that link to yours, the higher your site rises on the search engine results page.

If you weren't aware of one or more of these uses for Excel, you're likely to be blown away by what you'll learn in Excel training. The knowledge you'll gain can encourage your small business team to create custom applications to better organize their data. When the individuals on your team have a mastery of their own data, innovation and growth are certain to follow.