If you are a business person, you have a lot of stores, boutiques, malls, restaurants, and all kinds of shops, then, writing a business plan is already in your blood. Perhaps, all your business establishments have business plans already. And like all others, your business plan is in word doc format. But did you know that you can write a business action plan using an excel? Yes, excel file, like the ones with many lines, bars, columns, graphs. Yes an, excel file. You would not believe. But you can.
Our common understanding of a business action plan is that it should be done and written on a pad, piece of paper, or on a word doc in the digital word. And that is rightly so, because the way present our thoughts in business action plan is by essay. Just like we do when writing a thesis. And that is just correct. That is perfect.
But there are times, when we want to read ideas by lines, by bullets, by columns, by rows, by graphs.
Reading a business action plan in excel is very different from reading a business plan that was written on a word doc. When reading a business action plan in excel, you have to change your paradigm, you have to change your perspective, you have to change you outlook. When thoughts are written not in sentences or paragraphs, they become shorter than usual. They become terse, sort of empty and may require more elaboration. If something is bare, people question a lot. They would ask what is missing? They would look for what is missing. And that may be a big trouble for people not being used to reading in complete sentences, complete words, complete thought.
It takes a lot of practice reading a thought in ponto by ponto approach. This kind of writing presentation requires reader be creative, to think out of the box, and to be able to build, and make a sound judgment on his own. He needs to be able to connect the dots. He needs to be able how to connect one bullet from another bullet. He needs to be able to make a matrix of his own.
If you are the one writing a business plan in excel, you need to be able to make an abstract. You should be able to write in a summary. You should be able how to make a long sentence short, and a short sentence into a single phrase, and a phrase into a single word. Let us make some exercise here. How do you turn the sentence into something short or how do you say it in another thought:
The sentence contains nine words. And do you have any idea how to say it in a different thought? Actually and literally speaking, the answer is none. No. There is no way you can say it in a different sentence and in a shorter way. But, but you can do this, instead:
It is a bit far off, but if you are a creative reader, you will know what it means, and what is meant there. Now, if you can interpret either of the two, if you can transliterate one over the other, A to B, B to A, then that can be a good sign you have what it takes to read excel files.
An excel file is not just about numbers. It is not just about a list of items. In an excel file is a series of thoughts, a novel, a book. But our minds have been limited to reading it only as list, when it is not. Our tradition taught us that if you do not want to use sentences and paragraphs, you use an excel file. That is correct, and nothing is wrong with that. It is just for convenience sake. But do not you think that it only makes our thinking limited?
But given the fact we use excel purposes for listings, still, that should not stop us from having a business action plan using words only, and not in sentence. Is it possible, sure it is. Here is how it works. Go look at your To Do List. They are very short, and in bullet by bullet style. How about you make a sentence out of it? How about you make a paragraph out of it? How about you make a novel out of it, out of your To Do List of the day? Is it not possible? It is. Yes. Can you do it? Well, maybe not because you are not a novelist. But the fact that it is possible, then it is also possible to make just a list of a narrative essay. You can make a story in a list.
You have read books already, right? You noticed that in a book, there are chapters. There is an outline. There is a table of content. The summary is also another thing. Here is an assignment: From the table of contents that you see in a book, try to make a listing out of it. By listing, it means a list of words, row by row, column by column. Same as you would in a data entry of company’s salary. If you can do it, then you can make a business action plan in excel file. It will take a lot of practice, but if you will get used to it, then you will understand it is not that complicated. It is just a matter of getting used to it.
The advantages of having a business action plan in an excel file is that one can grasp the document in just one glance, in one reading. Whereas a word doc may take pages for a presentation, a business action plan in excel may only take a single page. That is correct, one single page for a business action plan. Well, maybe it is five pages or more for a large scale business action plan, but you can see what we are trying to understand here. It is all about quick scanning. It is all about immediate reading. It is all about knowing things at once, without any elaboration.
Nothing will replace the original word doc format when writing a business action plan. A word doc is always a word doc, and an excel file is always an excel file. We know the purpose of an excel file, we know its place among others, we know its functions, we know its role in the business world. A business action plan in an excel file will never replace its word counterpart. Nothing replaces the real Alice in Wonderland novel. You can read an Alice in Murderland, or Alice in the Country of Hearts, and many other remakes of the novel, but nothing replaces the original Alice in Wonderland, the novel.
A business action plan in an excel file together with a word file will be a good combination. We mentioned that nothing replaces the original. But a summary is also important in some other aspects. If you have both, the better. But remember, writing any of the two requires a lot of time, money and energy. So you may just opt for either one of the two.
So now you have seen, what a business plan looks like on an excel. If you are not sure you are doing the right thing, you can always look for other sample materials. There are some that can be found on the internet. Although the most common ones are the ones in word doc file.
Here is an example of this article in a shorter form, a summary
Now that you have decided that you will write in an excel file, you also need to be reminded what a business action file is all about. A business action plan is an outline of what you are to do in your business, how you run your business, what the routines would be. Just the sound of it, you would think it is that big and may require a book. That is correct. But there is one option. You can do it in an excel file. A business action plan in an excel file is much like an outline of your business action plan that is in word doc file, but more compressed. It is so compressed that a book is written in how many lines. It is so compressed that when talking about paragraphs, we only talk of sentences instead. It is so compressed that a sentence can be expressed in a single word. It is so compressed that a 50 page of a business action plan can be shortened to a one page. It is so compressed that reading it would only take just one glance, instead of hours, days, months, years.
Here is even more a compressed version of the above
A business action plan in an excel file is compressed version of its counterpart written in a listing form. Just like this one here, in this paragraph!
There are many ways you can do a business plan, and doing it in excel is just one of them. But of course, the most common one is doing it on a word doc. That is the common one, as well as the easiest way of doing it. But sometimes, you have to be creative – doing things in a different way, thinking out of the box. And of course, one should consider that this is business, not just a personal thing, a hobby that can be done in any way one want to.
