Is Excel still relevant? It is to about 750 million of its users. Yes, that spreadsheet software that’s been around for decades is still alive and well.
Excel still has a large community of developers and experts who help businesses manage data. Excel gets used for financial management, business reporting, inventory tracking, and more.
Businesses have a tool to turn data into action. The challenge for some is that they don’t know Excel well enough to generate a business report.
If this sounds familiar, you’re going to want to keep reading. We’re about to show you easy tips to generate a business report in Excel.
Table of Contents
Know What You Want to Communicate
The first thing to sort out is the purpose of the business report. Do you need to make a presentation or prove a point? There are a million different ways to generate a business report in Excel.
You might suspect your sales team’s close rate is lower than last year. That’s a problem within the business that needs to get addressed.
Knowing this will help you choose the right business report format. You’ll also be able to use the right data sets for your business reports.
Choose the Business Report Format
Excel has the capabilities to produce comparison charts, bar graphs, and pie charts.
If you want to compare two sets of data, choose columns, bar charts, line graphs, or scatter points. These formats give you the best ways to compare data.
On the other hand, if you want to look at the latest trends, a dual-axis line, line chart, or columns will work.
Format Data in Excel
Make sure you have a clean data set in Excel. Go over the data and remove errors.
Add headings to each set of data. These will carry over into your business report.
Select the data in Excel and go to Insert -> Recommended Charts. This should bring up a few options for bar and column graphs.
That may be enough for you to get the point across. If so, select the recommended chart that works best.
Getting Deeper in Data
If you’re working with large data sets, you need to bring out the big guns. This is where pivot tables help. They’re challenging to execute well.
Pivot tables group data points together, which gives you a quick summary of a large data set. You could hire Excel expert to format your data sets and create the pivot tables.
If you want to try to generate the business report on your own, select your data and go to Insert -> Pivot Table. You’ll enter the data range and create the report.
Use Microsoft Excel in Your Business Report
A business report is a way to visualize data so you can communicate a point quickly. Microsoft Excel lets you take a large set of data and generate reports using different formats.
Follow the tips in this guide, and you’ll have an annual or quarterly business report in no time. Visit the Tech section of the blog for more helpful tech tips and advice.