Nowadays, the road to commercial success seems to have gone through a maze. Relevant economic data are like photos taken from above the maze. It provides a perspective to help managers find a safe way. Therefore, it is wrong to deprive them of this information.

All the economic and business data your manager needs can be obtained free of charge on the Internet. By the end of the month, you will be able to display these data in reports, analyses and forecasts using spreadsheet formulas.

Spreadsheet data can help you improve your company's performance in the following ten aspects.

1. Track key areas and industries.

If your business is concentrated in certain geographical areas, you can compare the performance trend of the company in these areas with the economic situation in these areas. Or, if you focus on certain industries, you can do the same for those industries. Or both.

2. Monitor the financial performance of major customers and competitors.

You can help your manager track the financial strength of key customers and competitors and show the relationship between these trends and the performance of your own company.

3. Use relevant measures to measure the financial performance of the company.

Theoretically, you can compare the company's key performance indicators with the same performance indicators in the industry. This can help you find performance areas that may need improvement.

Unfortunately, standard industry statistics are usually meaningless. But you can use the company data on the Internet to generate your own industry indicators, thus providing you with excellent financial benchmark data.

4. Track inflation and its impact on companies, customers and competitors.

There is a lot of data on the internet, covering all the cost trends, from salads sold in bulk to carton costs to electricity prices. These data can help your manager to budget and control costs more effectively.

Strategically, this information can also help your manager find ways to make life easier for customers and harder for competitors.

5. Improve your forecast

If you ignore economic forecasts, trends and leading indicators, then your own predictions may be very wrong.

On the other hand, if the prediction is based on the formula associated with internal and external data, its accuracy can be greatly improved. You will also get a rolling forecast, which can be updated by recalculating the workbook.

6. Maintain a strategic early warning system.

No matter what your company does, no matter where it operates, data on the Internet can warn your manager of potential problems and future opportunities. Therefore, the Excel-based Early Warning System (EWS) can provide your manager with the time needed to avoid disasters.

7. Fill the manager's knowledge gap

Because your company is unique, it will be uniquely affected by external forces. But few managers know how these forces develop or influence your company.

A simple Excel dashboard displays the trends of key economic, commercial and government data, which can help your managers better understand their business environment and help them make better decisions.

8. Prove the rationality of the price increase.

The consumer price index began to accelerate. For more than a year, the producer price index has been increasing at an annual rate of 10%. Therefore, your company may need to raise the price as soon as possible.

How can you prove the price increase to customers who still think inflation is under control? After all, you can't show them your financial situation. However, you can show them Excel charts of major price index trends through the Internet.

9. Provide strategic insights

In 2009, Caterpillar's sales fell by nearly 50%. Even so, the company's profit in that year was nearly 654.38 billion US dollars, and its cash flow was positive. When the collapse happened, the company was ready to take prompt action because their economists had given managers many warnings.

Although you may not be an economist, easily available network data can help you find important information with strategic and tactical significance that managers urgently need.

10. Exploring new business insights

Using a Web browser and Excel's web query tools, you are used to viewing one web page at a time.

However, what if your Excel formula can list many URLs of a web page (such as a search results page) and then summarize the data of each page pointed by these URLs? You can summarize the data of hundreds of web pages in one calculation, and you can save dozens of hours of research time every time you update the spider report.

(Update:) 2011101October 3 1 day, I introduced KydWeb, an Excel add-in program that allows Excel formulas to return almost all data from the network. For Excel users, this is the only practical method I know, and the network is regarded as a large number of business data sources. So that you can realize these ideas.

In the past six months, I have been developing this solution for about 15 years, and I work 90 hours a week. I am very excited about this, because it represents a great progress in the value that Excel users can bring to the company where they work.

In my next article, I will introduce you to my favorite business data sources and show you how easy it is to use data in spreadsheets.

In addition, please note that I will tell you to download it for free.