Why Excel....

What is excel
Let's say for instance you are running a garage business and you have been spending a lot of money in operations which does not tally the income cash flow from the business, and you are looking to see which department uses a large percentage of the daily operational cost of the business. You obviously need a tool to analyse that cost, from money used in transportation to money spent in procurement of spare parts and garage work tools. Excel with its features can give you the best platform to analyse that cost enabling you to make decisions that will help you cut down on expenses while still maximising profits.
definitions
Excel is basically a tool provided by Microsoft to help you analyse and store data. The data can be in numeric form or text form or even Pictorial form in some cases.
Applications
Now from the above introduction we have seen one way we can use excel spreadsheets, by analysing a company's operational cost in comparison to the company's income cash flow. Another instance we can use an excel spreadsheet still in a business set up is analysing which products sale the most. In a business like running a spare shop for instance, you end up selling a variety of spare parts but not all products sale at the same rate.Excel will help you identify fast moving products from the slow moving ones and the dead stocks therefore enabling you to make the best decisions before procuring spare parts.
Another application where excel can be essential for use is analysing an employee's work performance and using that data to handle payroll. One can analyse variables like hours of work, hire date, years of experience and project completion time to derive rational decisions on whether to increase or decrease an employee's salary.
Features
Excel has a wide variety of features and functions that enable the user to work efficiently. Tools like conditional formatting allow one to point out and highlight a specific cell or cells that satisfy certain conditions like for instance duplicate values or text.
There are also a wide variety of numeric functions that can help one find the Sum, Mode or Average of a numeric data set.Such functions are useful in accounting.
Another feature which is a basic one but very essential is the one that allows you to convert any type of data in a certain cell to a format of your liking, for instance, a numeric data can be converted to a currency of one's choice.

Overview
Excel is generally the simplest tool one can use to analyse data with. It is easy to use and access and for handling small to medium data set.