Advanced Excel Courses and Their Application in the Business World

Most of us have some contact with the Microsoft Excel program during our working lives. Whether we simply need to open and read spreadsheets; or build complex workbooks to perform a number of monthly tasks; we sometimes need the confidence that only training can bring. Microsoft Excel does allow the user to train himself or herself with some accuracy. Advanced functions, however, take a huge leap away from the basic ability to put together simple sums or create tables. Once you start asking Excel to talk to different workbooks, or to include macros, you move into an area where advanced Excel courses can be extremely useful.

Need for Excel Courses

The application of advanced Excel courses in business terms is simply to ensure that members of staff who need to display these skills have them. They may be required when a member of staff previously occupying a junior position in Accounts moves up to take control of a department. Or they may simply be called for when a new requirement for more advanced Excel knowledge is perceived by the people and department who handle data within a business.

Excel is an extraordinary program when it’s used properly. In effect, it works as a user-defined GUI (graphical user interface) for interrogating potentially enormous amounts of data. Mostly, that data is numerical in nature, or at least has an overall numerical value attached to it.

Advanced Excel courses allow the delegate into the world of Excel mastery, in which spreadsheets and workbooks become elegant programs designed to extract information from company databases, as well as accounting with data input to designed worksheets by other members of staff. With the full power of Excel at its fingertips, a department can run almost any report or projection management can conceive.

In the main, the application of advanced Excel courses within business will refer to positions or situations in which advanced data management is seen to be of importance. Advanced functions may include the ability to evaluate formulas (finding out why results are different from those expected, which may be a function of an incorrectly entered formula as well as incorrect data); and the ability to use Excel to forecast results and define goals for specific departments within the firm.

Collectively, skills like this are referred to as “power user” tools. Advanced Excel courses aim to give those tools to the attendee: which, at base lie, defines the application of the course to the business from whence the attendee comes.

It may be a smart move for businesses to send several delegates on an advanced Excel course: the amount of knowledge gained through such a course is, after all, an investment on the part of the company in its future capacity for data management. Sending just one attendee on an advance Excel course is an investment that can only pay off as long as that individual continues to work within the business. If an expert leaves, the resulting knowledge attrition not only leaves a hole in the company’s expertise, but potentially means that workbooks created by the leaver are no longer operable.