Would you like to learn some cool excel tricks to make your job and your life easier?
Microsoft’s go-to spreadsheet software is used by about 750 million people around the world. Businesses rely on it to function.
Job descriptions require Excel experience and the software is used at every level of the organization.
Accountants, admins, engineers, CEOs, operations managers all rely on Excel to make their job easier. They can create spreadsheets to keep track of payments, create charts to see company growth and so much more.
The more you can use the cool functions in Excel, the more efficient you become in your job, and you have a highly sought-after skill.
Keep reading to learn some tricks about Excel you can use in your job.
History of Excel
There were a couple of precursors to Microsoft’s Excel dating back to the early 1980s. The first Spreadsheet program was called Multiplan, which was released in 1982.
It was getting beat by Lotus 1-2-3 in the marketplace, so Microsoft worked to develop something that could do everything that Lotus 1-2-3 does and more.
That was Microsoft Excel, which was released in 1985. It was first released for the Mac, not MS-DOS.
Its popularity took off because it was the first spreadsheet software that let you define what fonts to use, had an easy to use interface, and had graphing capabilities.
In 1993, the company used Visual Basic to automate tasks and record macros. These were incredible innovations at the time.
Since then, Excel has become an indispensable part of our work lives. Even on the home front, Excel is commonly used for lists and budgeting.
Why is Excel Still Popular?
With all of the rapid advances of technology we’ve seen over the last few decades, you’d think that something would have come along to replace this simple spreadsheet software.
With that many users, it’s going to be hard to replace. Even though many have a love-hate relationship with Excel, it’s still one of the best spreadsheet programs out there.
One of the more recent advances with Excel is that it’s more collaborative. You can now access spreadsheets in the cloud thanks to Office 365.
It’s so widely used, that there is a ton of information about it. If there’s something that you need to learn, you can easily find tutorials and how-to guides that will show you. You can find more info here.
Cool Excel Tricks to Do Make Your Job Easier
It doesn’t matter if you use Excel for data entry, forecasting, accounting, reporting, visualizing data, or accounting. There are things you can do in Excel that will make your job easier.
These cool Excel tricks will help you get through your data faster than ever.
1. Conditional Formatting
Conditional formatting allows you to easily visualize data by setting formatting rules for cells. Let’s say that you needed to know how much time each employee spends on a project while you’re building your business.
You want to make sure that you’re not investing too many resources to the point where you’re losing money.
You can list the hours worked, calculate the total hours, then go to Conditional Formatting to set your rules.
The easiest one is to highlight cells that are above or below certain values. In this case, you can highlight cells as red or add a red icon for cells that are above a certain threshold.
2. Select All with One Click
If you need to select all of the cells in a table, which is ideal for formatting data, you probably know that you can use CTRL + A to select all.
There’s another way that’s much easier, than trying to remember the key combination for this task.
Just click the upper left corner (next to Column A) of the spreadsheet and that’s it.
3. Consolidate Data
When you’re looking at multiple sets of data and trying to add them up, you can use the consolidate data function to tally up those numbers easily.
Let’s say you’re looking at expense reports from different offices and trying to come up with a final number.
Go to Data -> Consolidate Data. You’ll enter the cells you want totals for, and Excel will calculate everything on a separate spreadsheet.
You can do this for one or several spreadsheets, which is a huge time saver if you need to consolidate reports.
4. Validate Data
Sometimes the data that gets entered into a spreadsheet needs to have a certain range.
For example, if you’re doing a survey and you want your participants to be between 25-55, you can set those parameters up in Excel.
To make sure that people who don’t qualify aren’t in this data set, you can use the data validation tool.
Go to Data -> Data Validation -> Settings. You can then set it up so you enter whole numbers between 25-55. Then set up your error message if data that doesn’t fit the criteria is entered.
5. Pivot Tables
Pivot tables are a mystery to most Excel users. It does take a while to learn how to create a table, but you will save time when you need to organize a large amount of data.
Take your large set of data, and then go to Insert -> Pivot Table. From there, you’ll take your data set and create a pivot table that will sort, average, total or count your data into a separate table.
Excel’s Capabilities are Limitless
There’s a reason why so many businesses have used Excel over the years. It’s capabilities to extrapolate data and compile it in a way that’s understandable to anyone are second to none.
The only limit is you and your ability to use Excel. There are many cool Excel tricks that you can use, and the ones presented here are just the tip of the iceberg.
There’s a lot to learn about this simple software, and it would be in your best interest to enroll in an online course.
Not only will you impress hose you work with, you could put yourself in line for a better job and more money because these skills are in demand.
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