Excel SWOT Matrix Template
Creating a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) (SWOT) is extremely important for your business. A SWOT helps you in developing a new strategy for your company or to evaluate your product against other products. A SWOT is great if you want to explore new possibilities of business and a SWOT is an essential part of any business plan.
A SWOT is a living document because you, your product, your company are changing and your environment is changing around you. So doing a SWOT once a year would be a wise thing to do. Furthermore, taking these few hours to create a SWOT is an extremely rewarding because you can compare it to the previous SWOT and see where you progressed and where you went backwards (or your competitors forward).
We have prepared here a professional template for a SWOT matrix, it includes a central SWOT matrix with 4 colors (that you can change to you liking) in which you will type in the various SWOT items.
Strength and Weakness are subjects related to you. They are the two SWOT items that look towards you. They are internal.
Strengths: here you focus on what you are doing well, what your product are doing well, your advantages, your capabilities and your unique selling points, the strength of your people, of your know-how, assets whatever makes you stand out. What you know is clearly putting you ahead of others.
Weaknesses: what you know you are not so good at, what your product lack in feature, capability, design, etc....what you know a competitor is doing better than you.
Now Opportunities and Threats are items that are related to the world. They are SWOT items that are external.
Opportunities: in this SWOT item you see what your company or product could gain by entering new or other markets, partnerships, technologies, influence, territories.
Threats: this last item from the SWOT matrix is important because it lists the factors that are dangerous for you. The ones you have to be careful and that could put your company or product in danger
Later in this page, you will find some more advices to fill out a SWOT matrix.
We have prepared this Excel SWOT matrix template for you. Colors, Fonts and Size are entirely configurable. An INSERT button allows you to automatically insert new lines in the SWOT. This insert button is very useful and save you time working on the SWOT matrix.
Part of the process to fill out a SWOT matrix (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) is spending quality time on it. A SWOT cannot be laid down between two meetings (except if they are 4 hours apart :-) ). It is advised to spend at least 2 or 3 hours in a row on this. Ideally do it with someone else because sharing ideas with another person is clearly a synergetic process and you will get much more out of it when working on your SWOT.
A SWOT is an essential part of the evaluation of your product or company strategy. It creates a matrix that is easy to read and that contains many of the elements related to the success or failure of your product. These elements will later have to be used to develop a strategy.
This shows you how the matrix will look like once printed out.
Of course you can print the examples too.
If you like this SWOT matrix template, then do not hesitate to download it from here under.
Some more advice: I repeat but spend time on working on this SWOT matrix as it will help you all along the definition of your strategy. During your strategy definition and creation, you will need to defined objectives, targets and they will be completely linked and related to the Strengths, Weaknesses, Threats and Opportunities of this SWOT matrix.
Also write full sentences in your SWOT, not too long, but not too short too.
A SWOT has limitations. It does not go into details of every items, it does not give revenue figures of every opportunity listed in the SWOT, it does not give timing plans for implementation of opportunities. So, as said, a SWOT should be used wisely and with care and a SWOT is part of a greater purpose that is the business plan.
An interesting point is that not all companies act the same way once the SWOT matrix has been created.
Some decide to focus on their weaknesses. My SWOT matrix shows I am weak here than I should focus on improving myself. This will decrease the gap I have on my competitor for example.
Some decide to focus on their strengths and take the strong items of their SWOT and work on making them even stronger. This will increase the gap they have to their competitors for example.
So in you strategy, you can decide to further improve the strength revealed by your SWOT and making yourself even stronger and out of reach of competition or you can decide to improve your weaknesses and change them into strengths. All is permitted :-)
Also think out of the BOX.