Using Excel for Business: 10 Functions Every Leader Should Know

Businesses leverage the power of Excel in almost everything they do. They use it for the most basic tasks and even complicated ones like financial forecasting. For instance, they can use it to predict a company’s growth for the next 5 years using data from sales, expenses, etc.

Business leaders needs basic and advanced Excel skills to maximize the power of Excel and make the right growth projection. This means learning about the various Excel functions they can use for business. If you’re a beginner, you should enroll in an Excel class.

This post will explore the 10 of the most important Excel functions you need to know.

1. COUNTIFS

This is a critical function that you should learn as a business owner. It can help you count cells in a spreadsheet almost effortlessly. It counts the cells in a single or multiple range, and does this by considering single or multiple conditions.

You can specify the exact criteria you want to use when counting cells. The function will ensure the result it provides meets the set criteria. It’ll also be good to note that the Counties syntax is COUNTIFS(range1, “criteria 1”,…).

2. XNPV and XIRR

These functions are meant to make analysis work almost effortless, and are primarily for people who do financial research, investment banking, etc. XNPV and XIRR helps them simplify the lengthy processes of discounting cash flows – manual tasks that are often time-consuming.

These functions help specify dates for every individual cash flow you want to discount. In short, it provides solutions to the shortcomings of the basic NPV and IRR formulas. These formulas sometimes assume that periods are equal, leading to uneven timing.

3. Charting

Data presentation is an essential part of preparing data for business use. But presenting data visually can be daunting if you don’t use the charting function. This function ensures the data you want to present looks appealing and is easy to understand.

Working with charting is easy and doesn’t require advanced Excel skills. All you need to do is select the data you want to present. A menu will allow you to choose the type of chart you’d like to create. You can make basic or complex charts depending on your needs.

4. LEN and TRIM

These are among the most sophisticated functions you can use in business. They can help simplify your work if you’re a financial analyst. Working with large data sets will be less stressful using this function. It will help fix issues such as data organization.

For instance, you can use it to eliminate extra spaces from your data. Or, it can help you know how many characters are in a text. The syntaxes for these functions are =LEN(text) and =TRIM(text). These formulas are less common but worth learning about as a business leader.

5. CONCATENATE

You might consider this a function on its own, but the reality is that it’s not. CONCATENATE is just a way of adding dynamism to a worksheet by joining information from various cells. It’s one of the tools you shouldn’t miss, especially if you do financial modeling.

This function can help you create worksheet headers and labels. It will be worth mastering if you work with large data sets. You can update the various cells in your worksheet without any issues.

6. Paste Special

Pasting content might seem easy, but it isn’t when looking to ensure clarity and want to control how the text looks when pasted from the clipboard. Paste Special is a better way to copy and paste content than the simple Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V keyboard shortcuts that you might use.

There are simple shortcuts that you can use for paste special. Depending on what you want to achieve, you can use either Ctrl+Alt+V or Alt+E+S. Once you press Ctrl+C, a dialog window will open, and you can choose how you want to paste the copied content.

7. PMT and IPMT

These two formulas are worth knowing if you work as a financial analyst. There’s a lot they can help you do, including handling debt schedules. The formula is =PMT(interest rate, # of periods, present value).

Mastering these two formulas will help you handle debt easily. They can, for instance, help you check interest rates and make more informed decisions when dealing with debt.

8. VLOOKUP

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This function can help you find virtually anything you need from a large data set. It can be tricky to look for something manually from a large data set. This function ensures you find anything you want within a single click.

The first step to using VLOOKUP is selecting the desired cell. Then you can go ahead and type =VLOOKUP(). Write the value of the cell you’re interested in and the cells you want VLOOKUP to help search. End it with a comma and let the function do the rest for you.

9. IF Statements

You can also consider using this function for your Excel needs. It can help you check if the data you have meets specific conditions. There are only two possible outcomes you can expect from IF statements. It can either be true or false, depending on the condition.

This function has one of the simplest formulas. It’ll be simple to use it once you master the syntax =IF (logical_test, value_if_true, value_if_false). This makes it easy to break down data as much as you want. There are various IF statements so that you can replace one with another.

10. Conditional Formatting

This is another function that’s worth learning about. It’s the best tool to use when you want to identify trends in a dataset. Conditional Formatting is easy to understand and use even for beginners in Excel. You only need to follow simple steps: select data, click format on the menu and select conditional formatting.