We have been introduced to Excel and I find myself really enjoying working on Excel. I have learnt all the basic functions and formulae and try to search online for more useful functions which would help me model business problems.
I regularly practice on the functions and techniques and feel that over time, my utilization and efficiency levels would increase significantly through the use of Excel. But there is still a long way to go before I learn and master the more advanced techniques.
There are a lot of formulae and functions which can simplify the work which currently I am doing using two or three formulae. This would save time and effort and help me understand the concepts even more. Examples of such functions is pivot table, VLOOKUP function and also subtotals. I learnt about these functions online but am yet to fully understand and practice them.
Range finder is very useful for identifying the cells used in a particular formula and editing those cells quickly. A very useful technique that I identified using Range finder is using a large range of cells in formula a number of times. Copying the formula can be problematic as cell range tends to shift across columns. Using range finder, this shift in columns can be easily identified and corrected as desired.
The link to a video shows the use of pivot table. I found the technique of pivot table extremely useful. In the video, we are supposed to find the total order amount for each salesperson. As there are multiple entries for each salesperson, they have to be added to find the total sales.
Doing this manually is not possible for a large number of records. But using pivot table option, it is very easy. We can insert a pivot table after selecting the data. In the pivot table field list, we drag salesperson field to row labels and sum of order amount to values. This then sums all the order amounts for each salesperson.
Works Cited
GCFLearnFree.org. “Excel 2010: Pivot Tables Part 1.” Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 16 Dec. 2010. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lEPmBuyeIxs.
