Useful Decision Support Features of Microsoft Excel

Abstract

Nowadays there is hardly any organization that does not have a spreadsheet program on its computer. The spreadsheet can be considered as a kind of decision support system. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the important features that are available in the current version of the Microsoft Excel 365 that may be useful to an organization manager during the decision-making process. By default, Excel Spreadsheet also offers data manipulation features that make it suitable for decision support; these include data retrieval, sorting and filtering, the use of number formats and conditional formatting, what-if analysis (goal seek, scenario manager, data table), pivot table and charts. There are some add-ons that are not enabled by default; the most important of these are Analysis ToolPak, Solver and Microsoft Power Pivot for Excel. These additional features include a number of additional useful features for the decision maker to support decision making. Knowledge of the possibilities of a modern spreadsheet can provide an advantage to the decision-maker of the organization, because with the tools provided in the program, better decisions based on data and information can be made instead of the traditional (mostly instinct- and intuition-based) decisions.