Pivot Table

Most people hardly use the most useful features available in Microsoft Excel. Many are just using Excel as a calculator to do basic calculations like adding or subtracting numbers. This is a gross under use of Excel’s vast potential and feature rich functionality.

Do a quick check, and see if you use these advanced features of Microsoft Excel in your day to day work to improve your productivity and efficiency.

1. Finding the Top 10 Customers or Finding the Bottom 5 Performers in the organization
2. Give Names to Range of Cells, and then use them in formulas for easy referencing and decoding – like =Salary – CPF + Allowance
3. Exploit Pivot Tables to Summarize the data and slice & dice it in any way – like finding sales by product groups, or calculating productivity by department, or calculating sales by department by product by area.
4. Write Macros to automate routine things that save you a huge amount of time – example creating different pivots, charts, tables, and doing complex calculations, or compiling the cost benefit ration, cash flow statement automatically.
5. Highlight values that are above or below a certain threshold – like all sales above $25,000 to be highlighted, or all products with a net profit margin of less than 5% be highlighted.
6. Sort the values in Ascending, Descending or any Customized sorting order – like sorting in order of Manufacturing, Accounts, Sales departments.
7. Use advanced filtering conditions, and be able to filter data using multiple different criteria – like salary > 50,000 and sales <100,000 or Zone in East, West.
8. Create fantastic charts that portray the given business situation perfectly. There are over 50 different types of charts to choose from, and each has its edge, advantages and a reason. Do you know when to use which type of chart – like two axis charts, stacked column and line charts, bubble charts, pie, slice of a pie etc.
9. Create management dashboard that are dynamic, and provide a complete snapshot of the key business KPIs in the company – change the chart values at the click of a checkbox or change in a dropdown value
10. Use Excel’s advanced What-If analysis to do projections for future, forecasting, trend analysis etc. with ease
11. Use Lookup tables to find any value or corresponding value from a table using advanced functions and formulas – find values that in the left of the looked up value
12. Protect certain cells from data entry, and hide the formulas from other cells. Ensure that only certain values are keyed in the cells to avoid data discrepancies.

This is just the tip of the iceberg… These are common things that can be done easily with Excel’s in-built features.

So how many of these did you know? And how many would you like to learn more about? Even if you learn one new trick in Excel, it will save you immense time and improve your productivity. Investing in Microsoft Excel Training bears fruit in no time, and is a no brainer.

Microsoft Excel is really extremely powerful. Each version of Microsoft Excel – be it Excel 2007, or Excel 2010 or Excel 2013 adds more and more features to the already powerful dynamite of a package.

At ExcelChamp, we teach people how to leverage the maximum power out of Microsoft Excel in short training courses.

So what are you waiting for? If you would like to learn any one or more of such useful features of Microsoft Excel, just let us know. We provide online training through videos, which will show you each click, step by step, so you can master the new techniques easily, with exercises, and practical examples.

Go ahead, equip your team with the right skills. Get everyone on board to learn the basic and advanced features of Microsoft Excel, and Be Awesome in Excel!

Email to us to know more about Online Excel Training at ExcelChamp.Net.

Cheers,
VInai Prakash, PMP, ITIL, GAP, Six Sigma, Excel Guru