Many financial systems do a fine job of generating standard reports, but accountants often need more. In those cases, accountants can create custom solutions in Excel, but that approach has drawbacks.

It’s not for big data, but you can use Microsoft Excel to learn a lot more about analytics than you may realize. For many office workers, Microsoft Excel is simply the go-to spreadsheet application.

Microsoft Excel spreadsheets hold more than a million rows of data and automate number crunching, but they can do so much more. Excel’s simple interface lends itself to uses well beyond those that its ...