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Excel for beginners: 13 ways to use Excel

What is Microsoft Excel?

Excel is a spreadsheet-focused program made by Microsoft for all major devices and operating systems.

Now that we’ve introduced what Microsoft Excel is, let’s dive into some of the things you can do with it.

1. Calculations

With Excel, you can easily set up calculations between cells that contain numerical information. As a simple example, you can total up all the values in a single column and multiply it by a known variable.

You can use these calculations to manage loans, formulate budgets, and so on. This is the most fundamental use of Excel for beginners.

2. Charts and graphs

There are several features built into Excel that allow you to convert tables of numerical information into visual data — in other words, charts and graphs.

These are handy if you’re going to present information to a client or supervisor and need a concise way to display your findings.

3. Calendars and schedules

If you like keeping track of your schedule or calendar items in a convenient row by column format, Excel is ideal.

This is especially useful if you have recurring events on certain days of the week; you can use each row to designate a different time slot or event, and each column to represent a different day.

4. Inventory management

If your business needs to keep track of inventory, whether you’re providing logistics, keeping things in a warehouse or just keeping a close eye on the inventory within a given store, Excel can work wonders.

You can keep a list of all your items, and use columns to designate the locations of those items. Automatic calculations come in handy here, too.

5. Time tracking

If you have employees or contractors who need to keep track of their time and you don’t have automated time tracking software, you can use an Excel template to keep track of those hours. You can use blocks of cells to represent each day of the week, provide spaces to define hours worked, and automatically calculate the hours worked for a given pay period.

6. Goal tracking

Excel also works for goal tracking. For example, you could create separate sheets for daily, weekly and monthly goals, and then use cells to keep track of what your goals are and whether or not you accomplished them.

7. Task lists

In a similar vein, Excel can help to keep track of tasks you need to accomplish, checking off individual cells or changing their color to indicate when you’ve finished with each task.

This is especially useful if you use it for long-term tracking, so you can evaluate your overall productivity over time.

8. Project management

With the right approach, you can create project management charts that help managers quickly visualize their progress with various projects.

You can use columns to group tasks and projects in various states of progress, and share that master spreadsheet with your teammates so everyone stays organized.

9. Quizzes and surveys

If you’re interested in quizzing yourself on specific questions, you can create a master list of questions and answers, and then use another sheet to quiz yourself on those questions.

With similar formatting, you could use Excel to send a bank of questions to a group of people as a survey — complete with drop-down menus your recipients can use to fill in predetermined possible answers.

10. Forms

Excel can also be used to create various forms, which range from simple to complex. Again, you can use custom drop-down menus here to give your recipients or coworkers a list of predetermined options to choose from.

11. Mailing lists

Buying email lists is a bad idea, but you can collect and manage email addresses fairly easily with a well-structured spreadsheet. This has the added bonus of being easily searchable, so you can find individual records quickly, or sort those records based on individual variables, like response rate or whether or not they’ve converted in the past.

12. Data analysis

Perhaps most importantly, Excel can be used as a data management platform. Many online applications offer detailed data breakdowns in a .csv format, which can quickly be compiled and displayed in Excel.Excel allows you to easily sort your records or upload them to another source, or if you use the right calculations and formulas, you can crunch those numbers so you can gain perspective more quickly.

13. Basic accounting

You can use Excel to keep track of expenses, plan budgets, produce financial reports, and make forecasts. You can set up automatic calculations so your totals update themselves every time you input new information, and if you share your spreadsheets with other people, you can track your company’s finances in real-time.