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Excel. Chances are, that word alone inspires visions of lengthy spreadsheets, complicated macros, and the occasional pivot table or bar graph.
It’s true—with more than one billion Microsoft Office users globally, Excel has become the professional standard in offices across the globe for pretty much anything that requires management of large amounts of data.
But, if you think Excel is only good for making you cross-eyed while looking at a bunch of numbers and financial reports, think again. As Tomasz Tunguz points out, there are tons of uses of Excel in business (and beyond) outside of simple spreadsheets. In fact, the potential uses are seemingly endless.
There’s no way for us to compile a list that captures every one of Excel’s possible applications (even if you were up for reading a War and Peace-sized listicle).
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program which is a part of the Microsoft Office suite of software. A spreadsheet is a computer application for organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Microsoft Office is an office suite, a collection of different programs. Microsoft Excel, a program found in Microsoft Office, is a spreadsheet creator and editor.
However, in an effort to demonstrate the power and flexibility of everybody’s favorite spreadsheet tool, we’ve pulled together different ways that you could use Excel—both professionally, personally, and just for the fun of it.
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Start free courseAll about numbers
Of course, the core purpose of Excel all boils down to numbers. If you need to sort, retrieve, and analyze a large (or even small!) amount of data, Excel makes it a breeze.
Here are a few broad categories to keep in mind when it comes to implementing Excel for anything numbers-related.
1. Calculating
Find yourself running the same calculations over and over again? Build yourself a totally customized calculator in Excel by programming your commonly-used formulas. That way, you just need to punch in your digits and Excel will spit the answer out for you—no elbow grease required.
2. Accounting
Budget plans, forecasts, expense tracking, financial reports, loan calculators, and more. Excel was pretty much designed to meet these different accounting needs. And, considering that 89 percent of companies utilize Excel for its various accounting functions, it obviously fits the bill.
Excel even has numerous different spreadsheet templates to make all of those processes that much easier.
3. Charting
Pie charts, scatter charts, line charts, bar charts, area charts, column charts—the list goes on and on. If you need to find a way to represent data in a more visual and digestible way, Excel’s ability to transform rows and columns of digits into beautiful charts is sure to become one of your favorite things about it.
Want more information about the types of charts you can create in Excel? This article is a helpful resource.
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4. Inventory tracking
Tracking inventory can be a headache. Fortunately, Excel can help to keep employees, business owners, or even individuals organized and on top of their inventory—before any major problems crop up.
Making a plan
Let’s move on from the numbers—there are plenty of things that Excel can help you plan and organize that don’t necessarily involve endless rows of digits.
5. Calendars and schedules
Need to map out a content calendar for your blog or website? Lesson plans for your classroom? A PTO schedule for you and all of your co-workers? A daily schedule for you or your family? When it comes to various calendars, Excel can be surprisingly robust.
6. Seating charts
From a large corporate luncheon to a wedding, arranging a seating chart can be a royal headache. Fortunately, Excel can make it a total breeze. If you’re a real whiz, you’ll be able to automatically create your seating chart using your spreadsheet of RSVPs. Need help getting this done? This article provides a detailed walkthrough of how you can create a seating chart in Excel.
7. Goal planning worksheet
From professional goals to fitness goals to financial goals, it helps to have something to keep you focused and on track. Enter the beauty of Excel. Using the tool, you can create various worksheets, logs, and planning documents to help you monitor your progress—and, hopefully, cross the finish line.
8. Mock-ups
Excel might not be the first platform you think of when it comes to design. But, believe it or not, you can use the tool to put together various mock-ups and prototypes. In fact, it’s a surprisingly popular choice for creating website wireframes and dashboards.
Getting stuff done
Want to kick your productivity into high gear? Well, Excel can swoop in and save the day with a variety of uses that can help you tackle your tasks and to-dos with ease and organization.
9. Task list
Say goodbye to your standard pen and paper to-do list. With Excel, you can make a far more robust task list—and even track your progress on those larger to-dos that are currently on your plate.
10. Checklist
Similarly, you can create a simple checklist that allows you to tick off the things you’ve purchased or accomplished—from a grocery list to a roster of to-dos for an upcoming marketing campaign.
11. Project management charts
We’ve already touched on the fact that Excel is a total beast when it comes to creating charts. And, this concept holds true when it comes to various charts for project management.
From waterfall charts to manage your team’s progress to kanban style boards (just like Trello!) to keep things organized, there are tons of ways that Excel can help keep your project on track.
12. Time logs
You know that tracking time can be a huge asset to you and your productivity. While there are plenty of fancy apps and tools to help meet that need, you can think of Excel as the original tool for logging your time. And, it still serves as a suitable option today.
Involving other people
Need to collect information from other people? Survey tools and forms are one option. But, rest assured, you can also create your own in Excel.
13. Forms
Airport extreme compatible hard drives. From simple to complicated, Excel is a great option for creating forms. You can even program various drop-down menus so that users can select their choice from a pre-set list.
14. Quizzes
Trying to test somebody else’s—or even your own—knowledge of a subject? In Excel, you can create a bank of questions and answers in one worksheet, and then instruct Excel to quiz you in another.
Staying in touch
Managing relationships is crucial to your success both professionally and personally. Fortunately, Excel makes it easy to keep in touch.
15. CRM
Need a lightweight CRM to stay top of mind for your customers? You can make one in Excel. And, the best part? Building your own means it will be totally customizable. Sales Hacker also put together a nifty set of free sales excel templates you can use to help get started!
16. Mailing list
Data doesn’t just have to involve numbers. Excel is also great at managing and sorting large amounts of names and addresses—making it the perfect solution for your invite list for that company holiday party or the mailing list for that large promotion or campaign.
Using Excel, you can also mail merge—which makes it that much easier to print address labels and other necessary materials.
You can also apply a similar concept to create things like directories, RSVP lists, and other rosters that involve a large amount of information about people.
Just for fun
Excel doesn’t need to be all work and no play. There are plenty of other fun things you can create using the spreadsheet tool.
17. Historical logs
Whether you want to keep track of the various craft beers you’ve tasted, the workouts you’ve completed, or something else entirely, you can think of Excel as your go-to resource for keeping those things sorted and logged.
18. Sudoku puzzles
Love Sudoku puzzles? As it turns out, you can make your own in Excel. Or, if you find yourself stuck on a particularly challenging one, you can enlist the help of Excel to help you get it figured out!
Need help creating the Sudoku solver and generator? This post will get you well on your way!
19. Word cloud
Word clouds might not be the most scientific representations of data. But, they’re a fun (not to mention beautiful way) to gain an understanding of what words are being utilized most. You guessed it—you can create one using Excel. Here’s how to use information from Excel to create a word cloud in Wordle.
20. Art and animations
The capabilities of Excel likely extend far beyond what you’d initially anticipate. In fact, many people have used the tool to create some downright awesome art—from pixelated portraits to animations.
21. Trip planner
Have a vacation coming up? Make sure you have everything covered by creating yourself a helpful itinerary before you pack your bags and head out. Excel even has a handy trip planner template you can use to make sure you don’t miss anything (from your budget to airline information!).
Over to you
This might seem like a lengthy list. But, rest assured, it barely scratches the surface of all of the different things—aside from simple spreadsheets—that Excel is capable of. From lists to charts to design mock-ups, the different uses of Excel are seemingly limitless.
Feeling intimidated? Don’t worry - you can learn Excel online, all at your own pace, and become a spreadsheet ninja in no time.
Do you have something cool you like to create using Excel? Let us know in the comments!
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Start free course-->Excel Services is a service application that enables you to load, calculate, and display Microsoft Excel workbooks on Microsoft SharePoint. Excel Services was first introduced in Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007.
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By using Excel Services, you can reuse and share Excel workbooks on SharePoint portals and dashboards. For example, financial analysts, business planners, or engineers can create content in Excel and share it with others by using an SharePoint portal and dashboard—without writing custom code. You can control what data is displayed, and you can maintain a single version of your Excel workbook.There are four primary interfaces for Excel Services:
- An Excel Web Access web part, which enables you to view and interact with a live workbook by using a browser
- Excel Web Services for programmatic access
- An ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) object model for automating and customizing, and to drive the Excel Web Access control and help build more compelling, integrated solutions as well as the ability to user user-defined functions to extend the ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) object model
- A Representational State Transfer (REST) API for accessing workbook parts directly through a URL
Note
The Excel Interactive View feature has been disabled. For information about removing this feature from your website, see Removing Excel Interactive View from a webpage.
You can also extend Excel Calculation Services by using user-defined functions (UDFs).
Note
For more information about Excel Calculation Services, see Excel Services Architecture.
By using Excel Services, you can view live, interactive workbooks by using only a browser. This means that you can save Excel workbooks and interact with them from within portal sites.You can also interact with Excel-based data by sorting, filtering, expanding, or collapsing PivotTables, and by passing in parameters; this provides the ability to perform analysis on published workbooks. You can interact with a workbook without changing the published workbook—which is valuable for report authors and report consumers.Excel Services supports workbooks that are connected to external data sources. You can embed connection strings to external data sources in the workbook or save them centrally in a data connection library file.You can also make selected cells in worksheets editable by making them named ranges (parameters). Items that you choose to make viewable, when you save to Excel Services, appear in the Parameters pane in Excel Web Access. You can change the values of these named ranges in the Parameters pane and refresh the workbook. You can also use the portal's filter web part to filter several web parts (Excel Web Access and other types of web parts) together.However, you cannot use Excel Services to create new workbooks or to edit existing workbooks. To author a workbook for use with Excel Services, you can use Microsoft Excel 2013.
Note
Microsoft Excel Online, part of Office Online, also supports Excel workbooks in the browser. For more information about Excel Online, see Get started with the new Office.
Excel Services also has a Web service. You can use Excel Web Services to load workbooks, set values in cells and ranges, refresh external data connections, calculate worksheets, and extract calculated results (including cell values, the entire calculated workbook, or a snapshot of the workbook). In SharePoint, you can also save, save a copy, and participate in collaborative editing sessions by using Excel Web Services.
Note
or more information about snapshots, see How to: Get an Entire Workbook or a Snapshot.
Excel Services supports UDFs, which you can use to extend the capabilities of Excel Calculation Services—for example, to implement custom calculation libraries or to read data from Web services and data sources that are not natively supported by Excel Services.Excel Services is designed to be a scalable, robust, enterprise-class server that provides feature and calculation fidelity with Excel.
Scenarios and Features
Excel Services supports many different scenarios and features, some of which are described in this section.
Business Intelligence Portal and Workbook Analysis
A business intelligence portal displays scorecards and reports, and enables users to explore data by using only a browser. The BI Center feature in SharePoint Server includes a business intelligence portal and dashboard functionalities. Figure 1 shows a report center dashboard with a library of reports, a chart, and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) already set up.
Excel Services also enables you to calculate data on the server. Excel Services participates in the BI Center by providing the ability to calculate and expose Excel-based content on integrated BI dashboards.You can display an Excel workbook by using the Excel Web Access web part, connect to external data sources, and further interact with the data in the workbook.
Figure 1 shows a dashboard with a filter web part, and Excel workbooks displayed by using Excel Web Access web parts. Adobe premiere pro 2012.
Figure 1. Dashboard with filtering and Excel content
In addition to participating in integrated dashboards, Excel Services can also be used to display all or part of Excel workbooks to enable users to interact with that content in the familiar Excel user interface. Figure 2 shows a range being displayed, and cells being exposed for user input through parameters. Designating specific cells as parameters enables users to change values in those cells in a worksheet by using the edit boxes in the right pane. Excel Services then recalculates the worksheet based on the new values.
If you want to use certain functionalities in Excel or if you want to analyze a workbook by using all Excel functionalities, you can open a workbook in Excel by clicking Open in Excel. You can also open a workbook in Excel to print it and to work offline.
Note
To open a workbook by using the Open in Excel command, you must have 'open' rights. For more information, see the next section, Managing Workbooks, and User Permissions and Permission Levels on TechNet. Users who do not have 'open' rights can still open a snapshot in Excel.
Figure 2. Using the Parameters pane
You can also analyze, pivot, and interact with data by using Excel Web Access.
For more information about Excel Services and business intelligence capability in SharePoint, see the business intelligence documentation in SharePoint Server Help.
Managing Workbooks
The workbook management and lockdown capabilities of Excel Services enable you to:
- Maintain only one copy of a workbook, that is created and changed by a trusted author in a central, secure place, instead of maintaining multiple copies on each user's computer. The correct version of the worksheet is easier to find, share, and use from within Excel, SharePoint, and other applications.
- Secure and protect workbook models and back-end data. You can give users view-only rights to limit access to the workbook. For example, you can prevent users from opening a workbook by using Excel or you can control what they are allowed to view in a workbook. Users can have browser-based access to the content in a workbook that the author wants to share, but no ability to open the workbook in the Excel client, view formulas, or view supporting content or other intellectual property that may be in the workbook.
- Create snapshots of a workbook.
Excel Services is optimized for many users and many workbooks. It can also help load-balance calculation across the server farm.
For more information about managing workbooks by using Excel Services, see the SharePoint Server documentation on TechNet or SharePoint Server Help.
Programmatic Access through Custom .NET Applications
You can create custom applications—for example, ASP.NET applications—that:
- Call Excel Web Services to access, parameterize, and calculate workbooks.
- Open, refresh external data, set cells or ranges, recalculate, participate in collaborative editing sessions with other applications or people, save, and save as.
- Use custom workflows to schedule calculation operations or send e-mail notifications. (This uses SharePoint capabilities and is not a native part of Excel Services.)
User-Defined Functions (UDFs)
You can also use Excel Services UDFs, which enable you to use formulas in a cell to call custom functions that are written in managed code and deployed to SharePoint Server.
For more information about UDFs in Excel Services, see Understanding Excel Services UDFs.
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ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript)
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You can also use the JavaScript object model in Excel Services to automate, customize, and drive the Excel Web Access web part control. You can use the JavaScript object model to build more compelling and integrated solutions.
JavaScript user-defined functions (UDFs)
New in Microsoft Excel Services and Microsoft SharePoint, ECMAScript (JavaScript, JScript) UDFs enable you to add custom functions to Excel when you are using an embedded Excel workbook with OneDrive or an Excel Web AccessExcel Web Access web part in SharePoint. Besides the built-in functions that you use in Excel, you can add your own, custom functions using JavaScript UDFs that you can call from inside formulas in .
JavaScript UDFs are similar to UDFs that you can create for Microsoft Excel. The difference is that JavaScript UDFs are only used in workbooks embedded in a webpage and only exist on that webpage.
JavaScript Object Model
The Excel Services JSOM API now includes the following:
- The ability to reload the embedded workbook. Now you can reset the embedded workbook to the data in the underlying workbook file.
- User-created floating objects. The EwaControl object has new methods that let you add/remove floating objects that you create.
- More control over viewable area of the Ewa control.
- SheetChanged Event. This event raises when something changes on a sheet, such as updating cells, deleting or clearing cells, copying, cutting or pasting ranges, and undo/redo actions.
- Enabling data validation. You can now validate data that is entered by a user.
REST API
You can use the REST API in Excel Services to access workbook parts or elements directly through a URL. The discovery mechanisms built into the Excel Services REST API enable developers and users to explore the content of the workbook manually or programmatically.
For more information about the REST API in Excel Services, see Excel Services REST API.
REST ODATA
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New in Microsoft Excel Services and Microsoft SharePoint, by using the new OData functionality in the Excel Services REST API, you can request the tables inside an Excel workbook as OData. For example, to request Excel metadata about available resources in the SampleWorkbook.xlsx workbook using a REST call, you use the following syntax.
http://<ServerName>/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Docs/Documents/SampleWorkbook.xlsx/model For more information about the REST API, see the
Excel Services 2010 REST API documentation in the SharePoint SDK documentation.
To request metadata about available resources in the SampleWorkbook.xlsx workbook using OData, use the same REST syntax, except replace /Model with /Odata as in the following request.
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http://<ServerName>/_vti_bin/ExcelRest.aspx/Docs/Documents/sampleWorkbook.xlsx/OData
From there you can use OData system query options to get specific information about tables inside the workbook.