As students, you continue your education to gain knowledge and broaden your career opportunities. How will Excel (Spreadsheets) help you both as a student and a professional? How can these tools help you develop best practices in your future profession?

The importance of Excel (Spreadsheets) in educational and professional life The importance of Excel (Spreadsheets) can be felt by the way this software tool is utilized across today’s industries. The benefits of Excel (Spreadsheets) can make both educational and professional life much easier with its wide range of functionalities. For students, excel plays a huge role in research or thesis. There is a need for a lot of data collection and Excel (Spreadsheets) will allow an individual to manage and present the collected data in a much more engaging way. Because of that reason, students will be able to compute and generate more accurate study results. For finance-related courses, excel is used everywhere to make things such as balancing financial statements much easier (Ramachandran Rackliffe & Ragland, 2016). Another advantage of Excel (Spreadsheets) is that it makes studying more engaging and productive. Apart from advantages in educational life, Excel is also very important in professional life. The learnings in educational life will more likely make one very familiar with Excel. Using that knowledge and experience to master Excel will allow an individual to land a job in an easier manner (Tom, 2015). Excel (Spreadsheets) is used in almost any organization from information technology to the healthcare industry. Excel offers multiple tools such as pivot tables, sorting data, conditional formatting, functions (such as index, match), etc. Tools like these will improve the time management of the employees (Ragland & Ramachandran, 2014). It will make the individuals efficient and productive performers in professional life which will improve the chances of the individual to get a promotion and "excel" in his or her own professional life. From collecting data from the internet or offline sources to performing faster calculations, using Excel with its endless operations, will save a lot of time for the students. Thus, it is seen Excel (Spreadsheets) provides a lot of value to students as well as working professionals. Mastering this software has become more important than ever. References Ragland, L., & Ramachandran, U. (2014). Towards an understanding of excel functional skills needed for a career in public accounting: Perceptions from public accountants and accounting students. Journal of Accounting Education, 32(2), 113-129. Ramachandran Rackliffe, U., & Ragland, L. (2016). Excel in the accounting curriculum: Perceptions from accounting professors. Accounting Education, 25(2), 139-166. Tom. (2015, March 27). Top 10 Excel Features – Most Useful Excel Features. Analyst Cave.