Often it's better to just have an already good grounding of Excel, so you have a better idea not just of how to approach tackling problems in Excel yourself, but also to be aware of the different ways you might be able to do so, and therefore find the most efficient way of doing things. However, Excel is a complicated piece of software that most people learn in stages, often just learning as they go and looking up how to do new things as required. Besides the business world, Excel has also made its mark in other computational intensive fields thanks to its fairly powerful programming and number crunching capabilities.
You can, for instance, program the software to pull in information from external sources and automatically run it through all kinds of computations and financial models to give you meaningful digestible information in real-time. Its simple looking interface frontends a lot of functionality. That said, Excel is a deceptively complex piece of software. This makes it an extremely useful tool for businesses of all sizes, from small home offices to large multinational corporations. Microsoft Excel is very commonly used for recording numerical data like expenses and income, and for calculating and charting financial information.