MS Excel: The Old Friend with New Powers

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Digitization is one of the most disruptive force which all kind of organizations are facing. Today, business organizations are trying to adopt digital technologies in order to remain sustainable and relevant. Digitization has significantly changed the way the businesses are done. It has modified the sale and purchase of goods, affected the engagement between sellers and buyers, enhanced the competition, removed the barriers to entry and, at the same time, created new barriers to entry. People in sustainable organizations work on lot of data to gain sufficient business insight in order to produce goods and services which are valued.

Accountants are at the helms of affairs when it comes to data processing and analysis. Yet, most of the accountants hate coding and rely on their good old friend –  Microsoft Excel. Since the amount of data, that is required to be analysed, is so big, use of Excel in old fashioned way may slow analysis and, resultantly, decisions. It is time to stop and rethink because modern features of Excel would saves many hours and will help to produce timely and accurate reports. Following is the brief summary of three areas which accountants immediately need to explore and can reduce the error-prone use of formulas, functions and filters.

Power Query
It is a tool available in Excel which allows to import data from external sources and then clean, transform and restructure data as required for further analysis. These external sources may include CSV files, databases, web or other Excel files. Power query save tons of time because around 70% of time, while working on Excel, is spent on reshaping the data.

Power Pivot
Power pivot is the facility to model data, built relations among large data sets and create calculations. It can save valuable time of accountants by freeing them from mundane task of arranging data and applying formulas.  

Pivot Tables and Dashboards 
Pivot tables and dashboards are used to analyse and display information subsequent to data modelling. These are interfaces used by users to get insight about the business.

All these tools are built-in Excel and available without incurring further cost. Apart from these, another valuable intelligence tool created by Microsoft is Microsoft Power BI which is not part of Excel. It is a business intelligence and data visualization tool that enables the users to quickly analyse large amount of data and display it in eye catching form: graphs and charts. Desktop version of Power BI is free of cost.

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