It is a common thing for businesses to use Microsoft Excel, which is a spreadsheet application installed as a default component of the MS Office suite. You can use individual worksheets in Excel workbooks to create spreadsheets and lists. The application has any powerful tools at your disposal which can be used in the field of marketing and business promotion. There are a few functions related to business that you can perform on Excel.

     * Scheduling

    Basic employee and resource schedules are created by businesses using Excel and these schedules can be designed to automatically update any change in schedule as well as be color coded for the purpose of highlighting. You can create schedules for a weekly basis with the days of the weeks in the columns and with the rows containing the work hours or work shifts. You can fill in each slot with the resource name or employee name for a given day. By doing this all departments can work from the same resource sheet so that everyone comes to know of the given resource resource is available for them to use.

     * Product Sales

    You can track product sales on a daily, weekly, monthly or quarterly basis by using Excel. You can collect the sales data on an Excel spreadsheet and compare the progress over time as well as identify downward or upward trends as they happen. Once you have a substantial and meaningful amount of sales data tracked into Excel, you can predict sales for the next year which is a great thing for business as it lets you make significant plans for the future.

     * Basic Accounting

    Excel is used often by small businesses as a checkbook ledger or as a basic accounting program.  Deposits and expenditures can be entered on each row of the spreadsheet as you would enter them on a into a check register. The most beneficial thing about using Excel in this fashion is that you can compare business income and expenditure over time by looking at the data collected.

     * Customer Data

    In Excel, often the inclination to create ad hog lists translates into creating a full fledged customer database. When you use Excel to gather and track data, the databases do not have to be planned out in full. This is why Excel is ideal for storing customer information that grows in detail over time because there is the benefit of adding more fields without disturbing the existing data.

     * Investment Returns

    You can track total business sales along with total advertising and marketing expenditures in Excel and in this way, you can track your return on investment for each campaign. In case you are tracking the sales, you will be able to see how long it takes you to reach targeted profit levels or exceed this level from an ad campaign.

    So the Excel application, with all its advanced technical features, allows you to use it as a database application for marketing and business promotion in a well rounded, efficient and hassle free way.