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Last Updated on December 21, 2023 by Work In My Pajamas
Just about every business uses Microsoft Office, and aside from Word and maybe Outlook, Excel is the next most-used program. There are other spreadsheet programs available as well, such as Google Sheets. But no matter what spreadsheet program your company uses, spreadsheets have a lot of great uses for keeping your business operations organized.
If you don’t have the money for fancier, specialized programs, or simply don’t want to implement them, your company can get by surprisingly well by simply keeping everything organized in spreadsheets. Here are some of the best ways to utilize them for organizational purposes.
Budgeting
Perhaps one of the best things spreadsheets are good for is budgeting. Whether you need to come up with budgets for different departments, for a single project or even for the whole company, if it’s small, spreadsheets make budgeting easy thanks to their mathematical formulas and categorization options.
If you’re going to be using spreadsheets for important or complex budgeting, every employee who has a hand in it should learn some of the more complex formulas in order to get the best results and use the program to its full potential.
Lists for Tracking Sheets
Spreadsheets are excellent for lists, and these lists can be about anything. For example, spreadsheets are great for keeping track of employee contact information, to-do lists or directories, even the weekly visit of the office cleaning company. It is then easy to print them out and distribute them to employees, or post them in the office.
To make any posted lists more permanent, you can laminate printouts. You can also use spreadsheets to track the status of a project, request or anything else of the sort. You can have a column for dates when an update occurred, names and additional comments.
Changes can be highlighted, and completed elements can be listed on another sheet in the same workbook so employees know what has been accomplished and what has not, as well as what critical parts still need to be done.
Employee Organization
Spreadsheets also have a big use in keeping employee schedules organized. For example, kitchen cleaning duty might be something you can keep track of on a spreadsheet. They are also perfectly capable of keeping track of things like how many sick or vacation days an employee has used if you see no need to spring for more extensive HR software options.
These organizational spreadsheets can be private as well, to help individual employees keep track of their progress. In fact, using them should even be encouraged to help employees better organize their workday. You can create and keep templates as examples that employees can take and alter as they wish.
Charts and More
Most spreadsheet programs come with the ability to create charts from the columns of data in the sheet. This makes it easy to not only visualize data inputted into the spreadsheet, but also creates eye-pleasing graphics for any business presentation.
These charts and graphs are highly customizable. With external add-ons, spreadsheets become capable of doing much more. For example, there are add-on Excel reporting tools that ensure employees receive reports from accumulated Excel data.
Thanks to add-ons in addition to the sheer amount of features spreadsheet programs like Excel offer businesses, there is very little they cannot do when it comes to getting your business organized and in order. The formulas allow for quick and easy calculations and the cells themselves are perfect for lists and other employee organization data.
With add-ons, your spreadsheet program can do a lot more, including giving you regular data reports and analytics. Spreadsheets still have a lot of use in a business, both for business-wide purposes and individual employees. If you haven’t touched the Excel that came with your Microsoft Office suite, be sure to open it up and see what it can do for you.
