Some users have found novel applications for Excel that harness its power for business. Photographer created a marketing worksheet in Excel to track her photography leads and their conversion into actual shoots. This lead-tracking sheet features a data-collection worksheet and a series of PivotTables that analyze the data and provide summarized information about referral sources, failed leads, booking rates, and other details. You can find this worksheet as a free download from her Website.

Other users, such as , harness Excel's power to prototype user interfaces. He takes advantage of the application's structure to lay out a design, and he also puts Excel's drawing and form tools to good use in the mockups

Excel has always been a good tool for analyzing information created elsewhere. You can use it to analyze data from a range of sources by first importing or linking the data from a data store and then displaying it in a format that's easy to sort and summarize. If the links between Excel and the data are live, then changes or edits to the original data should update automatically in Excel. The Group, Filter, Consolidate, and PivotTable tools in Excel give plenty of options for summarizing the data to answer questions about your business.

With the advent of , even small businesses that don't operate a Sharepoint server can make use of the new multiuser authoring feature for Excel. For example, you can upload a budget or other worksheet prepared in Excel to a Windows Live SkyDrive account and make it available for all interested parties to view and edit online, regardless of where they are. They can use the Excel Web App to make changes, and they don't even need to have Excel installed to use it. This is a feature that Google Spreadsheets has offered for some time, and it's sure to be a welcome addition for business users of Excel.