1. Conditional Formatting
2. PivotTables
3. Paste Special
Grabbing (i.e. copying) some data from one cell and pasting it into another cell is one of the most common activities in Excel. But there's a lot you might copy (formatting, value, formula, comments, etc.) and sometimes you won't copy all of it. The most common example of this is where you want to lose the formatting. The place this data is going is your own spreadsheet with your own styling. It's annoying and ugly to plonk in formatting from elsewhere. So just copy the values and all you'll get is the text, number, whatever the value is. The shortcut after copying the cell (Ctrl C) is Alt E S V - easier to do than it sounds. The other big one is Transpose. This flips rows and columns around in seconds. Shortcut Alt E S E
4. Add Multiple Rows
.5. Absolute References
Indispensable! The dollar in front of the letter fixes the column, the dollar sign in front of number fixes the row, F4 toggles through the four possible combinations. Try it out with the following exercise. Type out three foods horizontally in cells B1, C1, D1 (Olives, Granola, Tomatoes) and three colours in cells A2, B2, C2 (Green, Blue, Yellow). Now type in cell B2 '=A2&" "&B1'. Congratulations: Green Olives! Now - and here's the exercise - add dollar signs so that when you copy the formula across you get green everything. Or just Granola, but of diffrent colours.Experment
6. Print Optimisation
7. Extend Formula Across/Down
The beauty of Excel is its easy scalability. Get the formula right once and Excel will churn out the right calculation a million times. The + cross hair is handy. Double clicking it will take it all the way down if you have continuous data. Sometimes a copy and paste (either regular paste or paste formulas) will be faster for you
8. Flash Fill
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Excel developed a mind of its own in 2013. Say you have two columns of names and you need to construct email addresses from them all. Just do it for the first row and Excel will work out what you mean and do it for the rest. Pre-2013 this was possible but relied on a combination of functions (FIND, LEFT, &, etc). Now this is much faster and WILL impress people. If Flash Fill is turned on (File Options Advanced) it should just start working as you type. Or get it going manually by clicking Data > Flash Fill, or Ctrl E.
9. INDEX-MATCH
This is one of the most powerful combinations of Excel functions. You can use it to look up a value in a big table of data and return a corresponding value in that table. Let's say your company has 10,000 employees and there's a spreadsheet with all of them in it with lots of information about them like salary, start date, line manager etc. But you have a team of 20 and you're only really interested in them. INDEX-MATCH will look up the value of your team members (these need to be unique like email or employee number) in that table and return the desired information for your team. It is worth getting your head around this as it is more flexible and therefore more powerful than vlookups
10. Filters
Explore data in a table quickly. Filtering effectively hides data that is not of interest. Usually there's a value (e.g. Blue cars) that you're looking for and Filters will bring up those and hide the rest. But in more modern versions of Excel, you can now also filter on number values (e.g. is greater than, top 10%, etc), and cell colour. Filtering becomes more powerful when you need to filter more than one column in combination e.g. both colours and vehicles to find your blue car. Alt D F F is the shortcut (easier than it sounds - give it a go). Conditional Formatting and Sorting serve related purposes. Sorting involves rearranging your spreadsheet, which is intrusive and may not be desirable. Conditional formatting brings visualisation. Filtering is fast and effective. Choose well.
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