The 4 Best Uses of Microsoft Excel to Improve Student's Daily Life
Here are 4 best Microsoft Excel uses for students to improve life efficiencies.
Have you ever wondered how you can make the most out of your life? I have, but that is not what I will be giving advice today about. Today, I wish to share more about how Microsoft Excel improves my daily life as a student. Believe it or not, as college students, we can use Microsoft Excel in our daily life, and it actually also does contribute to us improving our lives.
In the following part of the blog, I will be explaining the four best uses of Microsoft Excel especially for college students to improve their life efficiencies.
Time Management
Time is gold, and nobody likes to waste time (even though we still inevitably will). Because of that, a lot of us may be motivated to use our time effectively and efficiently as time waits for no men. We may be sitting down and thinking about what is best for us to do during every hour of our lives. The good news is, for those who like to keep a daily or even monthly planner, Microsoft Excel can be a great place to go to.
Microsoft Excel has a variety of templates to help you create daily planners or time management trackers. You can lay out your tasks, priorities, and deadlines to help you keep track of time. Especially as students, it may benefit us to lay out our class and work schedules and plan for leisure activities or assignments accordingly during our time available. This will help us feel satisfied with life as we are able to cherish every precious moment in life.
Goal Planning & Tracking
In the process of managing your time, you may also think of the possibilities of setting goals and plans to be achieved during a certain amount of period. With Microsoft Excel, you can create task-driven goal sheets to drive productivity. Just as stated by MakeUseOf.com (https://www.makeuseof.com/best-uses-of-excel/), by creating and defining milestones, you can track progress against your goals and map the progress against each aspect with relative ease. You can also utilize charts to visualize your progress and achievements. I am sure that can help motivate you a little more with achieving your goals.
Budget Management & Finance Tracking
One of the biggest uses of Microsoft Excel for students is for budget management or finance tracking. Students who are disciplined or want to be disciplined with their spending and funds can utilize Excel to help them achieve financial goals. This is because you can use various built-in accounting and math-related functions to keep track of your finances, budgets, and accounts. For example, you can list all of your income and expenses, categorize them, and set spending and saving goals.
Besides, as a college student, it is normal for people our age to consider buying a car or saving up to buy a house in the future. With Microsoft Excel, you can actually make a loan amortization table to calculate how much money you will need to be paying each month over a certain period of time if you are planning to take out a loan. You can calculate how much interest you would end up paying based on the rate. On the flip side, you can calculate with the interest rate how much money you can end up saving if you are to save your money in a bank account over a period of time. This is helpful because it helps you to look at the bigger picture and make a better financial decision. You can refer to Microsoft Word’s explanation of how to do those calculations. (https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/using-excel-formulas-to-figure-out-payments-and-savings-11cb708f-c137-4ef8-bcf3-5137aaeb4b20)
Oftentimes, you will find that saving money will be a better option than taking out a loan. After all, as the Greek proverb goes:
One minute of patience, ten years of peace.
Data Analysis & Visualization
Last but not least, with all the tools and functionalities of Excel, you can use Microsoft Excel to analyze and visualize data. No matter a college student, company employee, or business owner, you will face a time when you will have to deal with a large amount of data. Knowing how to use Microsoft Excel will give you a significant advantage because you will know better how to deliver insights after conducting data analysis and presenting with data visualization.
Besides, if you know how to analyze and visualize data, it will help you in class assignments and presentations more effectively convey meaning. Especially students studying accounting and business, specifically will need to be better equipped with Microsoft Excel knowledge because Microsoft Excel can help them analyze the meaning certain data is conveying. They can also rely on the tools to accurately calculate financial data. They just need to make sure they are building the formulas correctly.
Conclusion
Below is an infographic that briefly summarizes the four main uses I covered in this blog post. My content is inspired by Makeuseof.com (https://www.makeuseof.com/best-uses-of-excel/).
If you managed to read all the way here, I have two pieces of news for you. The bad news is time flies. The good news is you are the pilot! How you want to spend your time is all up to you. However, I would advise you to spend your time efficiently and wisely. Let Microsoft Excel help you by making its benefits apply to you. Yes, you.