 Are you ready to excel at Excel? Ooh, I see what you did there. We're gonna show you how on the journey. It's been around for longer than I have. It was created when Emma was created. You know who's younger. And even though Excel is 30, flirty and thriving, it is still doing great in the business world. Everyone still uses it to this day. Yeah, but it's intimidating if you're a beginner, right? I have still dabbled with Excel and I'm still very intimidated by it, but that's why we're here to help you. Yeah, and a lot of the how-to guides are really technical and they go into the actual technical aspect of how to do it and the mechanics. We're gonna talk about just 13 basic ways that you can use it in a real-life practical situation to help you out in your business. Totally, very digestible. So let's start with the very basics in case someone watching this has never opened up Excel before. Microsoft Excel was obviously created by Microsoft. It's a spreadsheet-focused program that's really able to be used on any devices or operating systems. Yep, you got your columns, your rows, and what's also cool is you can add in words and numbers within each cell. So the customization that you have there is endless and that's what we wanna jump into today. So first and foremost, you can use Excel for calculations, right? That's the most basic, simple thing that it can do. You can add up all the things. You can multiply all the things. You can divide all the things. You get it. That's great for budgeting too. I mean, whether it's something for your business or even in your personal life, I've had some friends do it when they're moving just to calculate what's happening, how much the cost is, and the cells make it easy to do that because of the customization and you can sum it all up. The other great thing about Excel, there's a lot of numerical things happening, right? Numerical data, but what's really cool is Excel gives you the option to turn it into charts and graphs. And for some of your clients, or maybe just for you at home and myself, you wanna be a visual person. This is a great way to see the breakdown and receiving color coded and stuff. Yeah, I love that. I love a good pie chart, you know? And so this is a great way, especially to show those clients or a supervisor rather than giving them all these numbers that are really hard to digest. Daunting. Exactly, no one wants to see numbers. You display it in a really cool graph and there you go. You got some cool colors. You got some visual flair to your data. The third thing you can do is use it for calendars and schedules. So, I bet you're so organized. Okay, you'd be surprised. So outside of work, total chaos. Nothing's planned, love it. But in work, I do like to have my schedule laid out in a consistent format. So what you can do is have each column be a different day of the week. So you can have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. Okay. Forget about the weekends. And then each row represents a different time throughout the day, right? So you have your eight a.m., nine a.m., 10 a.m. So this is a really good way to write down what you need to know, because I'm super scatterbrained. So just knowing, okay, this is what I need to do. I have an eight a.m. I'm like, all right, cool. All right, number four, inventory management. Excel is great for this. Whether you have a really close eye on something that you're doing or to help keep track of stuff in the warehouse or for your dating life. Yeah, whatever inventory you need to keep track of, Emma. Number five is time tracking. So if your business is just starting out, you don't quite have that automatic time tracking software quite yet, or if you're just old school, you can use Excel to keep track of all of your different employees' time sheets. Yeah, that reminds me so much of this deli that I worked at when I was back in college at Indiana University. Great deli, great sandwiches. Really ahead of the curve in a lot of ways they made them too, but when it came to our schedules, I just have this great visual of the bulletin board, pen to paper, my manager would be updating it there and we'd go up with our phones and take a picture of it. But yeah, definitely could have been more organized, as simple as Excel to do something of that nature. Yeah, they definitely could have used Excel. Yeah, number six, Excel is great for goal tracking. Daily, monthly, weekly. It's like your vision board, if you will. Yeah, there are a lot of different ways you can use Excel to really monitor different key performance indicators for your business, KPIs. We actually did a video on seven ways you can use Excel to keep track of your KPIs. You can watch that right here. Number seven is task list. So you can use Excel to keep track of everything you need to get done, like a great to-do list, and then you can check off those boxes. You can change the colors when you've completed a task. I mean, there's nothing more satisfying than like actually checking something off or you're like, I'm done, good to go. Yeah, and it's great for just overall productivity along the way, a duration of time to see how productive you've been. And I mean, we use it here on the journey. We have videos that we wanna accomplish and when they're done, we change that color to green light go. All right, that brings us to number eight, project management. This is great for your teams. You can have columns with tasks and groups and then communicate to all who's doing what. It's a great way to stay organized. I love it for my teams, whether it's the journey team or my marketing team that I'm working on. I've even worked well with roommates in the past. Number nine is quizzes and surveys. Fun! Yes. So I know back in the day in high school, I used to love using like flash cards, right? To study for high school. That worked for me. Wait, Alex, you still do this? Whatever. Anyway, so this is like the adult version of flash cards, right? So you can have all your questions on one sheet and then all of your answers and use that to really help you gain that knowledge. The 10th thing you can use Excel for is to create forms. So there are different various forms that you can create. They range anywhere from simple to really complex and they include a custom like dropdown menu with different options. Yeah, it's really great for filling out forms. It is, and I've noticed it's great for when I work with partners on co-hosted events. So that's why we keep organized, kind of like what you love the to-do list. And then we have a set of objectives or event milestones that we want to accomplish. And then in the little dropdown menu, we have not done in progress or completed to choose from. So as we go, we can know, it's not so just gray. Like, well, is this started? Have you done this yet? You can really see where we are in the stages because of those predetermined options to choose from. So number 11, mailing lists. This is actually a great way to organize the email addresses you already have. Also, don't buy email lists. Collect these organically, maybe like from your website. But one thing I helped, I went to this auto repair shop. It was one of our customers actually to help them do this. They're like, we have all these email addresses. I'm like, that's really powerful for your business. They're like, but what do I do with them? Well, put them in an Excel doc. Yeah, and an added bonus to that is it's really easily searchable. So, you know, you have that huge long list of email addresses. But if you need to find one specific thing, it's really easy to find it that way. You can sort based on different variables. Or the search bar. Right, exactly. Yeah, I noticed that too, when after a webinar, we had a list of registrants, who attended, who did not attend. And I had someone, one of the sales reps asked, like, you double check on this business. Did they attend the webinar or not? I just went to that big doc, very long list of who did not attend, who attended. I just searched the email. Yeah, boom, I knew in seconds. Number 12 is data analysis. So a really important function for Excel is that data management platform. So you have all of this raw data, right? And you want to break it down so that you have some insight as to what those numbers actually mean. So, you know, a lot of different online applications, they'll have a format that you can compile and display all that data in a really beautiful way in Excel. Yeah, I love that. Raw data leads to insights. All right, and without further ado, number 13, basic accounting. This is great. I noticed for us over here at GoDaddy to help to see where budgets are, finances are, and they even have some automatic calculations that just update themselves. So at a glance, you can know, hey, for example, how many sales off of this event did we get, and updates in real time, makes it really easy to see where you're at financially. Yeah, and if you're not super accounting savvy or you just don't want to waste a lot of time, they actually have a lot of templates you can use for accounting. Oh, great. Yes, and we're always looking for ways to be more efficient with our time. Always, always. Excellent. And you can't spell excellent without Excel, you guys. Gosh, that's brilliant. And now you have 13 ways to do that. Yeah, endless opportunity when it comes to Excel. That's a wrap. Be sure to like, comment, and share this video. Also, don't forget to subscribe to our channel. Ring that bell so that you're the first one to know whenever we upload new videos. This is The Journey. Thanks for joining us.