Four Ways to Improve Your Excel Skills
Data and Excel sheets go hand in hand. If you’ve been in the IT sector, I’m sure there would’ve been at least one day you had to open that spreadsheet and worked on it. No matter if you’re a manager or a lead who must maintain tons of reports and trackers or an employee who has to fill them, excel sheets are the indispensable part of any organization today. Since we’ve all understood that we need to be constantly associated with this complex tool, I thought we’ll take some time out to quickly learn to become a power user of Excel to make our everyday lives simpler and more convenient with these Excel tips. Read on.
Learn the Shortcuts
Microsoft has been very generous with its innumerable keyboard shortcuts. There are shortcuts for almost every action on Microsoft Office and if you learn the most commonly used action you perform on a consistent basis, you won’t even need to keep frequenting to your mouse to perform your actions. As an additional word, don’t read all the excel shortcuts with an intention to become a pro but just learn the ones you use on a daily basis. Moving back and forth between the mouse and the keyboard is the annoying part of working on Excels and this eliminates it.
Formulas
Excel is choked with formulas and it’s very strenuous to remember them all. So, what you can do is jot down the common categories of formulas you use every day and the formulas you use frequently. If you want, print them out on a piece of paper and stick it on your desk. Excel has lots of categories such as the statistical and mathematical functions such as average and sum, string functions such as the find and the reference and lookup functions like Vlookup and match. On a Friday evening, when your brain has left for the day, get down with Excel and print out the formulas you use the most. Your Monday would be smooth!
Array Formulas
The more an Excel sheet is loaded with data, the slower it becomes. That’s because of the presence of heavy functions and formulas. Array formulas are such memory hogers that tend to slow your machine down, making you feel annoyed and frustrated. Let’s not go there. So, instead of array formulas, use simpler formulas and functions. You’ll be surprised to know that some regular formulas perform better than their array counterparts.
Clean and Backup
This is basic. Cluttered Excel sheets are very annoying and it ends up taking too much space on the sheet and in your mind that you lose it after a point. So, if you’re not using a particular set of data, either delete them or move them to a place away from your main sheet. This frees up more space and it will allow you to look at more insights and feel better about your sheet. Besides, save your sheet very regularly because after spending hours on pulling off a task, if your system or the software crashes, the consequence and the frustration can be depressing. Besides, compile similar sets of information on the same Excel sheet if possible. Having a separate sheet for everything doesn’t make sense unless the requirements are completely distinct.
So, these were the four simple ways to make working on Excel simpler. There are more ways to make work on Excel easier. If you’re a data scientist, Excel is one of the essential tools you’ll be working on. So, level up your Excel skills and ensure there are no more frustrating days at work.
Also Read
Top 10 Data Scientists in India
Why Building Substantial Internal Analytics Expertise is Core to Performance
