Five valuable Excel skills your employee should have

Microsoft Excel is an industry standard when it comes to spreadsheet applications. This powerful program can provide a variety of valuable functions that can help you quickly track, sort and analyze data: If your employees don’t know how to use it, your company is at a serious disadvantage. Here are five ways you can make sure you’re getting the most out of the software.

Summing Formulas: Adding each cell individually isn’t just time-consuming, it’s borderline impossible once you’re dealing with significant amounts of data. Being able to create a formula using functions like COUNT, COUNTA, SUM, SUMIF and AVERAGE is invaluable when it comes to dealing with a lot of information.

Conditional Formatting: Having accurate data is only half the battle: it also needs to be easy to read and understand. Adding conditional formatting allows you to quickly parse data and highlight particular trends. When it comes time to write client reports, it helps to be able to make certain things stand out on the page.

Protecting your spreadsheet: If you’re dealing with sensitive data, it needs to be protected. Users should be familiar with the wide range of protections offered by Excel, and how they can collaborate without risk.

Filtering: Like conditional formatting, filtering can help you get useful knowledge quickly from a large amount of information. It allows you to only see a particular range of data, which comes in handy if you (for example) only want to see sales figures for one year.

Graphing: A picture is worth a thousand words. Conveying information visually can save valuable time during meetings and presentations.

If your ideal employee has an advanced knowledge of spreadsheet programs, a Microsoft Excel assessment can help you identify good candidates.