What Are Some Practical Uses for Excel?

1. Manage your finances with Excel. Create a personal or family budget and track your income and expenses by month or year. Create a spreadsheet that helps you plan and track your savings for retirement, or for your child's college education. Use Excel's built-in mathematical functions to automatically calculate routine or complex equations.
2. Create a calendar or schedule with Excel. Whether it's a weekly, monthly or yearly calendar for your family; a personal daily appointment planner; or a schedule for managing homework, bill payments, or your favorite sport team's games, Excel makes it easy to organize, filter and search through large amounts of data.
3. Plan and manage a project or event with Excel. Whether you are planning a large work project or a wedding or holiday party, use Excel to keep track of multiple tasks and deadlines, and the schedules of other participants or collaborators--and as a central database of all information and files you need to execute the project or event.
4. Create lists through Excel. Excel's convenient tabular layout makes it easy to format many different types of lists. Create checklists to make traveling and packing easier. Create an emergency phone list for your babysitter. Manage your book, wine or DVD collections via lists. Run your household better by using Excel lists to manage your groceries, chores and holiday gift-giving.
5. Create an address book to manage your mailing labels. Excel's extensive 'filter,' 'sort' and 'search' functions make it easy to create and manage a large contact database. You will be able to find and sort contacts by city, state, street, last name or birthday, or by whatever other criteria and detail you enter. When you need to create mailing labels to send greeting cards or announcements, use Excel's mail-merge feature to quickly format and print out the names and addresses of your contacts.