Why is spreadsheet useful

This is an important feature that allows individuals without much technical experience to utilize all the features offered by spreadsheets. Spreadsheets are not only useful for inputting, tracking, storing, and analyzing data.

But they are also a tool used greatly for forecasting and modeling information. In this article, we will review the five most prominent advantages of spreadsheets.

Keep reading to learn more. Every kind of data requires some type of organization in order to be viewed in logical terms by the human mind. One of the advantages of spreadsheets is that they provide an efficient way to accomplish this.

For example, you may be tracking the revenue brought in by a particular client on a specific day. You can title certain columns left to right on a spreadsheet with clients, while the rows top to bottom on the left could list the dates. The cells in the middle that corresponds to a client and a date will show the amount of revenue brought in by a particular client that day. If the number of days spans more than what your screen display allows, you can keep adding rows on the spreadsheet vertically.

Additionally, you can continue to add more columns as the number of clients you have increases. Furthermore, you may still want to see the date and clients on the screen, no matter how far you scroll to right or down.

Another one of the advantages of spreadsheets is that they allow you to pin any of the columns or rows that you do not want scrolling out of view. It is a helpful feature to always have the column and row headers visible on the screen. When you have a lot of consistent data coming in, spanning months, or even years, that might take a lot of scrolling to get to a specific piece of data.

Spreadsheets make this much easier by allowing any document to have multiple tabs. Each tab is essentially one of many pages, all belong to the same spreadsheet. This feature further increases the data organization in spreadsheets, enabling you to grab any data you require quickly. In many cases, the spreadsheet data likely originates from one source.

However, multiple contributors are actively editing or adding additional data. Another one of the advantages of spreadsheets is that access can be permitted to multiple users or a single user depending on the scenario. A fair question of data integrity could come up in these situations. Realistically, if multiple users are allowed to edit the spreadsheet at the same time, one user could accidentally or purposefully overwrite changes made by another user.

If there is no lockdown of edited data, then it can easily be overwritten by a subsequent user edit. In the image above cell B3 is selected. This can be done by clicking on the cell. A spreadsheet can contain one or several worksheets tabs. In the picture above worksheet 3 is selected. Clicking on the plus-sign will add a new worksheet to the spreadsheet. By far, the most frequently used spreadsheet program is Microsoft Excel, but other spreadsheet applications exist as well.

These programs allow users to work with data in a variety of ways to create budgets, forecasts, inventories, schedules, charts, graphs and many other data based worksheets. The true power of the spreadsheet is its ability to handle complex mathematical calculations and automatically recalculate totals as the underlying data in the sheet changes.

Use spreadsheets for the creation of receipts and invoices. You can also use it to do business related forecasts and plan ahead for the future. These are some of the common purposes spreadsheets are used for, but there are additional ways you can utilize a spreadsheet to achieve your business goals.

Configure them to your needs, and tap into all the ways you can use this simple yet effective tool. Nicky is a business writer with nearly two decades of hands-on and publishing experience. Women on Writing.