Learn Microsoft Office Excel - Microsoft Office Excel tutorials

Most businesses aren't successful simply because someone had this great idea or this superior skill. When it gets down to it, business success is often driven by good management.

Good management comes in several forms. A big part of it, of course, is managing people -- both employees and customers. Managing time is also extremely important -- especially for small business owners and managers who tend to have a number of roles and responsibilities.

TIP:
When formatting data in Excel, to display numbers in thousands or millions you can create a new number format. Click Cells on the Format menu, and then click the Custom category. In the Type box, type 0, or #, for thousands, and 0,, or #,, for millions

But another important key to small business success is managing the numbers and knowing where your company fits in the marketplace. To make the bottom line meet your objectives requires staying on top of it all, the financial data, the trends and market fluctuations.

For the hands-on owner/manager who wants to work the figures and be on top of trends as they develop, here are five quick ways to chart key business issues from several different perspectives. All of them are easily accomplished with Word, Excel spreadsheet software or PowerPoint presentation software included in Microsoft Office 2003 Small Business Edition.

Overview of financial performance: Whether you're preparing to seek a loan from a bank or trying to interest investors in your company, putting together a solid financial overview will help. This PowerPoint template (U.S.) gives you a professional format that you simply customise with your financial data -- everything from income to assets.

Value product analysis: When you're trying to determine the best way to make your case to prospective customers and clients, let the numbers tell the story. Use this Excel template (U.S.) to easily chart the benefits of your product or service against the investment required. You'll come up with the net value, both quarterly and cumulative.

Competitive points list: How does your business compare to your competitors? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What do you offer in terms of training and expertise that your competitors don't have? By filling in a simple Word template (U.S.) you can chart how competitive your business is. Not only will it tell you where you need to make improvements, you can convert it into a marketing piece that showcases your strengths.

Basic marketing plan: Having a great product or service and a competitive advantage in the marketplace only leads to success when potential customers know about it. Even if you don't have a large marketing budget, it makes sense to have a marketing plan that shows step by step how you intend to reach your objectives. This Excel template (U.S.) outlines the basics of a marketing plan and helps you understand how to put together a marketing campaign, taking into account the various types of marketing you could do and the scheduling required to put a plan into motion.

Job performance review guide: Having the right employees can be a key to the success of any business. Yet as a busy owner/manager, it can be hard to track performance on a regular basis. Using this performance review guideWord template (U.S.) -- and customising it as necessary to match your industry -- is one way to standardise employee reviews and track individual performance over an extended period.

Although You can access, edit and share Excel files on the web using Excel Web App of Microsoft with your employees, how I wish we can do this on our own sites with reliable cheap web hosting without having our users use SkyDrive or SharePoint.

Focusing on Sales
When you know where things stand financially, you can focus on what you need to do to achieve your financial objectives. For instance, after running a value product analysis using the Excel template discussed above, you may decide to shift your marketing emphasis to focus on the most relevant customers or customer segments.

That's where Microsoft Office Outlook 2003 with Business Contact Manager (BCM) can be extremely useful. Chances are you may already use Outlook to manage your contacts, e-mail, calendar and tasks. With BCM, which is an add-on to Outlook 2003, you can extend those capabilities to efficiently organise and manage customer accounts and track business and sales opportunities. For instance, BCM can help you:

Easily integrate all information regarding a customer account in one place, accessible with one click. This means you can find information quickly and improve customer response.
Track sales opportunities and product information associated with those sales from the point of initial contact all the way through after-sale customer support.
Run reports based on the information you've collected about accounts, customers and sales -- this includes pre-defined reports that you can use as they are or modify to better suit your requirements.
Manage leads and sales prospects throughout the sales cycle, including revenue potential, probability of closing and expected close date.
Import key information from other Office tools. For instance you can link Word files to your contacts and sales opportunities or incorporate price lists from Excel spreadsheets.

One of the benefits of using Microsoft Office 2003 is that its components are designed to work together. They also share a familiar look and feel which makes for ease of use and reduces the learning curve. So just as your team works together to help expedite tasks and grow your business, so do Office components like Excel, Word, Outlook and Publisher.

And the bottom line is, good management and good tools can be part of a winning formula no matter what business you're growing. Use the links under Helpful Resources to learn more about products designed to help small businesses thrive.

5 Quick Ways to Chart Business Growth