Estimating and Pricing applications are a very popular use of MS Excel. Over the years I have probably built more of this type of application than any other. MS Excel provides a perfect platform to quickly put together and automated pricing application based on one or many variables which impact pricing. Depending on the project and user needs, the pricing interface can be made very user friendly for selecting product options via drop down lists and menu options. This ease of use makes adoption by the users very easy. Of course the other key benefit is the accuracy and cost savings of the pricing applications. No longer are mathematical errors being made in determining a price which sometimes can have significant impact to a business. Additionally, often times pricing a product or service can be time consuming when done in a manual manner. The time savings to a company’s employees can be a tremendous cost savings for the company.  See Examples

Planning and forecasting apps are most commonly used in project management situations. These projects helped to streamline this process for the customer as well as make it more accurate than the usual guessing process.See Examples

I call this area the”kitchen sink” because this is the category that all of the other application types get classified.

It is amazing to see all of the different ways that MS Excel is put to work in the world.  It is truly the Swiss Army Knife of applications!  I can attest to that as I have had a tremendous variety of project requests to design spreadsheets for projects.

Easily one of the most popular requests I receive is to take an extract of raw data that a customer has and manipulate it through a macro to another format or structure for use in their business process.  I would estimate 70% of my projects are of this nature.  So if you have a project similar to this, rest assured I can probably help you out!See Examples