Excel reached its 30th year of existence three years ago. Others believe one's thirties are the most enjoyable years of life. Excel by Microsoft has certainly never been better, and each new edition includes new and more helpful features.
A chronology of the many versions of Excel and a comparison of their features can be found further down on this page.
Whether you like it or not, Microsoft Excel is a daily need for various organizations. The world has been significantly altered as a result. Let's examine how Excel impacted a variety of corporate sectors and individual people!
Massive Impact on the Global Finance Sector
In the world of finance, spreadsheets are quite commonplace. Since they invented spreadsheets, large companies have recognized the potential and advantage of using spreadsheets to handle financial data. Many businesses could reduce the time and effort spent handling massive volumes of financial data thanks to Microsoft Excel.
Excel formulae made it possible to automate a significant portion of the job, which freed up time that would have otherwise been spent by financial specialists doing the calculations manually. Unfortunately, some businesses noticed the negative side, as their personnel exploited Excel to cover up their financial losses.
This caused the businesses to see the dark side of Excel. There were also cases in which workers made mistakes in their computations, causing companies to lose billions of dollars due to human errors.
Bookkeeping and Accounting
Accounting and bookkeeping are a component of the financial business; however, these two facets of the industry need to be discussed independently. Nowadays, having an adequate understanding of Microsoft Excel is a must for working as an accountant or bookkeeper. Creating databases using Excel's more complex functions and pivot tables is a good way to simplify the work. Bookkeepers and accountants can easily comprehend vast volumes of data, allowing them to make accurate growth projections for businesses, conduct qualitative research, and so on.
Human Capital
Excel spreadsheets allow human resources professionals to get a clearer image of their staff, including their performances and associated costs. They depend heavily on Excel and its capacity to arrange data for users automatically. Excel has never before allowed for the management of human resources to be so neatly arranged.
Marketing and Product Administration
Excel is used by marketers and other professionals to examine and track the statistics and analyses of goods, to understand the market, to generate material that is visualized for customers and investors, and analyze market trends. Excel's widespread adoption in these companies has unquestionably played a role in the development of the paperless movement. With Excel formulae, there is no need to manually write down and then erase data on paper to evaluate your probable losses or earnings. Instead, everything is updated automatically.
Data Analysis and Data Science
Excel has led to the creation of new career professions dealing with data, such as data science and data analysis, which were previously unavailable. Excel is essential to data science and analysis; it cannot exist without it. Even if they didn't go to college, some people comfortable working with Excel have launched new professions as data analysts and data scientists.
Personal Finance
Excel is taught to individuals so they may learn to keep track of their costs. Every family can better manage their money and their outgoing costs. On the other side, some individuals educate themselves in Excel and then work as freelancers for other individuals, assisting them with data input, personal finance, and other data manipulations.
New Technologies
Microsoft Excel forced other technology firms to develop rival tools that deal with spreadsheets, conversion tools that produce Excel from PDF or other formats, mobile applications that operate with Excel files, and a variety of other tech products that arose from spreadsheet technology.
Comparison of Excel versions timeline
Excel, from its earliest days, has been able to provide something useful to each new version of the program that it has spawned. In 1985, Microsoft published the first version of Excel for the Macintosh computer, and in 1987, the company produced the first version of Excel for the Windows operating system. Excel 3 was released in 1990 with new capabilities, including drawing tools, add-in compatibility, and 3D charting. Excel 4, introduced in 1992, was the first popular version of Excel. It included more fully configurable toolbars, as well as mouse support and more keyboard shortcuts. Support for Visual Basic for Applications, multi-sheet workbooks, and macros recording was included in a significant update to version 5.
You may check the timelines above and compare different versions of Excel starting from 1995 up to the current day. The most recent version of Excel has just been made available, and in the years to come, we will watch to see how this software will affect the commercial sector.
The Conclusion
Excel is here to stay, and companies will continue to rely on Excel as their go-to tool for managing everything from corporate team building activities to the projects themselves. The vast majority require Excel expertise at an advanced level of business professionals working in the modern world, and demonstrating proficiency in Excel may open doors to new professional opportunities. Excel is a useful program, and everyone who wants to provide their company with the best possible results should use it.
