In today’s situation, knowing Microsoft Excel is vital for most office professionals because excel skills are needed in office works like accounting, charting, inventory tracking, calendars, schedules, etc. It will help you work smart and be productive, boosting your document’s efficiency and overall potential. It is easy to learn, and it will make you a spreadsheet guru in no time. In this article, learn to use excel like a pro by following these tips.
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1. Format painter
First on our excel tips is the use of format painter. If you wish to copy the format of the cell to another cell or cells of the spreadsheet, this shortcut is the best thing to do. The first thing you have to do is click the cell you like to copy the format. After that, click the format painter located at the home tab, then the home ribbon in the clipboard group, the format painter looks like a paintbrush, and then when the selected cell becomes a dashed line, it copies the format of the selected cell. After copying, move your mouse to the cell you wish to copy the format and then release the mouse click. But if you want to have this format in two to five or as many as you want, you need to click and drag, holding the click until you reach your desired cell.
2. Conditional formatting
You can highlight the cell with a particular color in conditional formatting depending on its cell value. It is easier than coloring cells one by one. The way conditional formatting works is that you either select the entire row or column, whichever you like, and then go to the Home tab, home ribbon, and then you will see the Conditional formatting in the styles group. Click Conditional Formatting to give you some options. At the bottom, it mentions rules several times that you will set up for the content of your selected cells. Let’s choose Color Scales because it is the easiest example. Click color scales, and then you will see gradient colors. You may choose whatever color you like depending on how valuable it is. Green represents the valuable, yellow for moderate, and red for the least. You may select the other options with a different color scheme to reverse them. You may also explore the other ways to display the data like data bars, highlight cell rules, top/bottom rules, and icon sets. It would be fantastic to explore these options because this is an exciting tool.
3. Quick analysis tool
Quickly analyzing any data rather than the older method of inserting a chart or tables. There is a Quick analysis tool menu icon in the bottom right corner when you highlight any table. If you click that, it will give you options to modify your table. For example, if you click Totals, and then you click Sum, it will show the sum of the columns, or you can click the other sum to sum the rows. You can also do formatting on the table, and you can add icons, create charts and insert them into the spreadsheet. You can also turn it into tables and also add sparklines. There’s so much available in the quick analysis tool that makes it quick and easy to avoid going through the menus and manually inserting one of these different options.
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4. Filter
This tool helps to sort out data with simple drop-down menus. It enables you to focus on the relevant data you need to work on and temporarily hide irrelevant data sets. To start, click anywhere inside your table, go to the Data tab, sort and filter group, and click the filter icon. You will notice that it creates a filter at the top of each one of the columns. When you click any one of these, it shows you all the unique values listed anywhere in that column. You can turn them off or select one in particular or two or as many as you want, and then click OK to apply the filter. It filters out only those rows of data that matched the filter you made. The filter is great to use in arranging an extensive list of information.
5. Autofit column width
You can use Autofit column width instead of manually adjusting each column to fit the data to maximize your time and effort. It is the quickest way to adjust the width of your columns. Just go to the space between columns, and your cursor will turn into a col-resize cursor and double click. It’ll automatically readjust the size of the columns to fit the widest point of the data anywhere in that entire column. You can also highlight all the columns, click on any one of them the same way, and it will autofit the multiple columns simultaneously.
6. Images in charts
Having images in your charts will spice up your presentation. Once you created the chart from a set of data, point your cursor in the chart and click at least a couple of times to bring up the format, which will appear at the right corner. In the format data point, click the Fill & Line icon. Click Fill and then choose Picture or texture fill option. If you select that, you will see the Insert picture from below the options, and then you can pick from a file and choose an image, and it will fill that image in your chart in place of the normal texture.
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7. Text to columns
It is a feature of excel wherein it enables you to parse the data in one cell /column into many columns using a delimiter than can be adjusted. When you copy the data from other applications, a web page, or other source and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet, it will place in one line or column. But you want these text out into different columns. The first thing to do is highlight the text, go to the Data tab, Data Tools group and click on the Text to Columns. In this situation, you can choose between Delimited or Fixed Width. If commas separate your text, click Delimited and select comma and not tab. You’ll notice down in the Data preview that it knows where the spacing is between each column and then click Next. You can choose some of the formatting if you want to and when you’re done, click Finish. And now your text is separated into different columns. Remember that there has to be a delimiter in your text to separate them.
Written by Danielle dela Torre
