Most non-Excel users believe that spreadsheets are only useful for financial professionals and accountants. However this is not true as Excel is available on all computers and is brilliant for data analysis, graphs, calculations, statistics and much more. Here are some of its less known but impressive features.
Conditional Formatting
This analysis tool highlights data that the user requires. For example the sales manager of Company X needs to highlight the month with the highest and lowest sales numbers. This can easily be done by conditional formatting with the highest and lowest values set as the conditions. Conditional formatting can also be used to find values less than a specific number, top ten, top 10% and much more.
Pivot Tables
In Excel, Pivot Tables are excellent for summarising specific data with within a large set. The condition for pivot table analysis is that the data in question must be in a tabbed form with no empty cells in the table. To create a pivot table, click on any cell within the data set, click on insert on the menu, and then Pivot table.
Sorting & Filtering
Excel helps us make sense of large amounts of data, however sometimes it can be too much. Sorting and filtering your data will save you time and make viewing your spreadsheet easier. When you sort the information in a spreadsheet, you can organise the data in any way that you want to for premium data management.
V-Look up
The look-up function in Excel extracts data from a table and inputs it into another source, which is brilliant when dealing with large amounts of data and can cut data entry time from hours to minutes. The function can be set to extract data with an exact match or for a range, useful for invoicing a company with several products.
Basic Maths
Simple calculations can be entered into the formula bar in Excel. All formulae in Excel start with an = sign. A simple calculation would be =a1+a2 (enter), this would than calculate the total of the data in cell a1 plus the data in cell a2. You can also subtract, multiply and divide by substituting the + for the corresponding sign:
– subtract
* multiply
/ divide
