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Excelling In Excel

 

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Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application that’s widely utilised by businesses all over the world. It allows you to input data, create charts and tables, utilise formulas, analyse findings, and much more. 

It thus enhances efficiency dramatically via allowing businesses an effective way of scheduling, managing basic accounting, tracking product sales, monitoring return on investment, storing customer data and so on and so forth. If your business is tech-heavy for example, you can track all expenses, such as ID printers like https://www.digitalid.co.uk/blog/id-card-printers-2020 and servers, as well as their status and repair details in Excel.

Nonetheless, in order to truly reach optimum efficiency, you need to know how to excel yourself in Microsoft Excel. There are many tricks and trips which will ensure fast and effective completion of tasks and present you with a multitude of beneficial input and analysis opportunities. Here are some of the best…

Time saving tips

Microsoft Excel is filled to the brim with excellent shortcuts. Here are some that will undoubtedly save you a wealth of time in the long run…

  • Quickly skip through worksheets – Great feature for those dealing with a huge number of worksheets and mass data. Simply hit ‘CTRL’ and ‘Page Down’ to move a worksheet to the right, alternatively hit ‘CTRL’ and ‘Page Up’ to move one to the left. 


  • Add a calculator to your toolbar – Using Excel and performing simple calculations seems to go hand in hand considering numerical data input is one of the main uses of this software. Thankfully Excel boasts an in-built calculator feature, yet you will need to add it to your toolbar. So, head to Quick Access Toolbar options (down arrow symbol next to the undo button), click More Commands, click the drop-down button under Choose Commands, select All Commands, and scroll down to the Calculator and click Add. 


  • Hide data – You may need to print data yet hide certain aspects, such as employee salaries. This usually results in people opening several Excel files, copying data, pasting it there, deleting the original, printing it, then moving the pasted version back to the original file and so on and so forth. Confused yet? Well, don’t do it. All you need to do is right click on the column or row and click hide prior to printing. 

Improve quality of work 

When using spreadsheets and inputting a wealth of data mistakes can be easily made, which in turn diminishing efficiency monumentally as you have to re-do the task again. The following tip decreases the chances of this occurring…

  • Shade alternate rows – This increases legibility. Highlight the range of cells you wish to format in this way. Head to Conditional Formatting, then choose New Rule, pick “use a formula to determine which cells to format”, in the edit rule description box input the following; =MOD(ROW(),2)=0. 

Better analysis opportunities 

The only way businesses can improve is by assessing what they are doing at present.

  • Pivot Table – This offers you the opportunity to manipulate data, aggregate it and present it in an array of different formats. 


‘VLOOKUP’ formula – And finally, in the current age of online marketing this formula proves its worth, especially for those using PPC. It allows you to compare and connect various sets of data. In essence it will see if a set value from one table is found in another. It then returns a value from the second table. A good use of this is when assessing the worth of a keyword you have in mind.

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