Normally it is said that “Excel” is the most powerful tool in the suite of Microsoft Office, or we could also speak of “Calc” in OpenOffice, the speech is the same. We should ask, however, why in the suite there is a spreadsheet, is a manager of a text document, if one can replace the other.
In general, you use the spreadsheet to create all those documents in which it is useful to make calculations automatically and is the best manager of text if you want to write static information.
Take for example the VAT number of a company, this information consists of 11 numbers in a database, it is preferable to insert it as a numerical value or text? Since this value does not make sense to do the calculations we can manage as plain text. That’s why sometimes I have seen people using Excel only because more powerful and then they just wrote as if on a sheet of paper all static text.
For example, if we were to create a model for what our bills would agree to use? It would be possible to create a Word template with form fields, but we will always have a static sheet and we should use the calculator for entering values. In this case it is good practice to use Excel because we could calculate everything automatically using formulas and the bill would be completed as you insert rows. The problem, if anything, will be the case where we inserted a number of rows less than the ones that we need, then we must add gradually correcting the formulas of summation.
Write static information in Excel is not very useful, it works much better with Word, but everything can be best used to using VBA (Visual Basic for Application) and the macros in Office tools. Here then you could create an excellent billing service even with Word, but then you go in the world of programming and use.
In concluding this brief article I can say that my advice is this: Use Excel when you need to perform calculations, otherwise it is much better Word.