After years of using Excel in a corporate environment here are my top 25
Excel 2016 tips and tricks.
Welcome to Sele training. I'm about to show you some useful tips and tricks for
Excel 2016. They're in no particular order so be sure to watch all the way
through to the end of the video. These tips and tricks have made me more
productive and I'm sure they'll make you more productive as well. Take a moment
and click the Subscribe button on the bottom right of this screen or at the
end of the video click on my smiling face and as always like, share, comment,
ask me questions. I'm happy to answer every question that I receive. Now let's
get started. Number 1 - Quick Analysis Tool. Most people aren't aware of the
Quick Analysis tool. When you highlight any table, in the bottom right-corner is
an icon. This is the Quick Analysis tool menu. If you click on that it gives you a
wealth of options you can choose from. To modify your table for example, I can
click on Totals. Click Sum and it shows the sum of the columns. You can click
this sum and it sums the rows. You can also do formatting on the table, add
icons, create charts and insert them into your spreadsheet, turn it into a table,
and add sparklines. There's so much available here and it makes it quick and
easy to avoid going through the menus and manually inserting each one of these
different options onto your table. Number 2 - Filter.
if you're not using filter you should be. It's very simple. Just click anywhere
inside of a table of data, go to the Data tab, click this Filter icon, and it
creates a filter at the top of each one of the columns. When you click on one of
these it shows you all the unique values listed anywhere in that column
and you can turn them off. Select one in particular or two or three or as many as
you like. Hit OK and it filters out only those rows of data that matched that
filter. It's a great way to manage large lists of information. Number 3 -
Drop-Down Lists. Say you want to select a list of values like 1 2 3 4 and you want
it to be selectable from this column right here.
Go to the Data tab, click on Data Validation, and choose List from the menu
choice. In the source select the choices that you want to make available and hit
Enter. Make sure this in cell drop-down checkbox is checked and hit OK. Now when
you're in this column and you hit the down arrow it gives you those four
choices to choose from. If you try to type something that is outside of that
range it gives you a warning that the value doesn't match the list. Number 4 -
AutoFit Column Width. This is by far the quickest way to
adjust the width on your columns. Just go to the space between columns so your
cursor turns to this shape 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 of the columns, click on any one of them
the same way, and it will do multiple columns at the same time. Number 5 -
Transpose. Let's say you want to reverse the columns and rows in a table. All you have
to do is highlight the entire set of data, right-click, copy, choose the
location where you want to place the results,
click Paste Special, and check this box Transpose, and hit OK. Now all the columns
and rows have been reversed. Number 6 - Remove Duplicates. Removing duplicates is
handy if you have a list of names or other information where there's
duplicates and you want to end up with a unique set of values. In this example I'm
gonna highlight this list, click on Data, choose Remove Duplicates. The columns are
selected - first name, last name, and amount and in this case I'm going to hit OK to
remove the duplicates where all three of those columns match. That should be true
for row 3 and row 8 and as you can see it removes the 1 duplicate value. Now
let's do the same thing but in this case we're not going to do the amount and
we're only going to do it where the first name and the last name are exactly
the same. It now removed two duplicates. Now be sure to use this
Remove Duplicates when the results are going to be removed. If you just want a
filter you should use the Filter as we looked at earlier because this one
deletes the data that is duplicates. Number 7 - Goal Seek. Goal Seek is an
advanced function in Excel and is part of the What-if Analysis tools. In this
example say we have a number of items that we sell. We know how many the
quantity that we've sold of the first two items and the price each and what
the total dollar amount is but for the third item we want to know how many of
these we need to sell in order to get the overall total to $6,000. Well, you can
punch in numbers right here randomly to try to figure that out and then keep
working it until you get to a number that matches the 6000 that you're
targeting but you can also use the What-if Analysis to figure it out for
you. To use Goal Seek you want to start by clicking on the target cell,
go to Data, What-if Analysis, and choose Goal Seek. It fills in the target cell
as your Set Cell. The value we're trying to reach is 6000 and the cell we're
going to change is the quantity for Item3. When you hit OK
it goes through and calculates 197 as the magic number to reach that goal of
6000 total. Just be aware that you can use your imagination to come up with all
kinds of scenarios for the What-if Analysis using Goal Seek. It handles very
complex solutions. Number 8 - VLOOKUP. VLOOKUP is a very commonly used tool to
find data in a list. In this example I have a list of names with an associated
ID. Over here I'm creating a new table and I want to reference the names in
this table to look up the ID from this list and fill them in. To do that I want
to use the VLOOKUP function. Click on the insert function button and you want to
find VLOOKUP in the list. You can type it in, do a search against all and once it's
there select it and it brings up the function arguments. To remind you of what
you fill in, for each one of these there's a description down here. The
lookup value is what value do I want to look up in the list, and that is the name
Nancy. The list that I'm going to choose from is the entire list and the Column
Index Number is the column that I want to return the value from. In this case
this is column 1 and this is column 2 so I'm going to choose column 2.
And finally, the range lookup is either True or False. If you use True it looks
for the closest match. False is an exact match and in almost every
situation you want to use False. Hit OK and you can see that it looked up Nancy
in the table and found the ID and returned it over here. All we have to do
then, let's copy this data down. Now you'll notice right here Carol isn't in
the list so it returns an N/A. Now also note that there is an HLOOKUP function which
is horizontal instead of vertical so if you're looking up something in a
different format you may need to use the HLOOKUP but it essentially has the
same parameters. The beauty of the VLOOKUP function is if you change a
value it will update it automatically in the table.
Number 9 - Flash and Auto Fill. Flash Fill and Auto Fill are slightly different.
In this example we have some email addresses and they fit the format of
first name dot last name throughout the list. If you start typing the name,
because you want to pull it out of the email address, Flash Fill automatically
detects the pattern that you're using and it recommends a solution to fill it
in for you. So you can hit enter and it fills those in for the remainder.
Auto Fill is also based on patterns so if you put a number in, for example, and you
use the right corner and drag it down, it auto fills those numbers in there. Now if
I did 1, 2 and selected both and then drag it down
it sees the pattern and automatically increments by one each time. You can do
the same thing with dates, with months. Just remember there has to be a
detectable pattern and to use the correct option on the corners. So if you
type something in and you drag it, it's gonna copy it. If you type something in
and you double-click it fills it in automatically, matching up with the left
column next to it. And if you define a pattern make sure you highlight both or
more and then drag. Flash Fill and Auto Fill are both really good at making
you more efficient when typing information in. Number 10 - Paste Special Values. Paste
Special Values is a handy tool to use if you have a bunch of data with formulas
and you just want to copy all of that information over to another location and
get rid of all those formulas. So you can see on this I have a formula that adds B
and C together into a full name. I have a formula that does a divided-by for the
percentage on this and if I want to just take those things and remove them and
copy this to another location so I just am left with the data, all you have to
do is highlight, Copy, pick a new location, and do Paste Special. In the list choose
Values and hit OK. Now you'll notice when I highlight these there's no formulas.
It's just the value of the data. You'll find this to be more common than you'd
think because often times you want to remove all that formula and formatting
and use the data in a different way and this is a quick function to help you
do that. Number 11 - Images in Charts. it's real simple to spice up a chart
with images. I've created a bar chart from a set of data. If you come into the
chart and click at least a couple of times to bring up the Format. Click on
this Fill & Line icon. go under Fill and there is a Picture or Texture Fill
option. If you select that, you can pick from a file and choose an image and it
will fill that image in on your chart in place of the normal texture. Number
12 - IF function. The IF function is very handy if you want to do conditional
data representation. For example in this chart I have a column ABCD, a column with
numbers. Some of those numbers are greater than 10 and some are less. I want
to create an IF function to determine when these numbers are greater than 10
and say "BIG" and if they're less than 10 I want to say "SMALL" so I click on the
Fx. Type in IF, choose All, and do Go to search for it. Bring up the IF function.
The first parameter it asks for is the logical test. What we want to know is if
this number is greater than 10. If that's true we want to print "BIG" and if it's
false we want to print "SMALL". Ht okay and there you have your answer.
I'm going to copy this down to the other ones and now
I can see the one that's small. Number 13 - Insert Screenshot. If you want to insert
a screenshot onto your excel page go up to the Insert tab, click on Illustrations,
and go to Screenshot. It will show a list of active screens from other
applications. Select the one you want and it inserts the image onto the page. You
can then adjust the sizing however you want and you can also come up to the
Crop and crop out portions of the image.
Number 14 - Absolute Cell Reference. Excel uses two types of referencing - relative
and absolute. As you can see on this chart C4 times D4 takes the
quantity times the cost and gives a result. This is a relative cell reference
because as I look down the list it's referring to the second one to the left
and the first one to the left in the formula. The Total is also a relative
cell reference because it is showing E4 minus F4, the discount. And as you move
down the list it's referring to the one to the second left and the one to the
left in the formula. Now if I was to add a discount in here the formula would be this
number times this number and this is a relative cell reference reflecting the
one to the left times this one up here. The problem is is when I copy this down
this one shouldn't be pointing to this number times G2 because there's
nothing in G2. We want it to stay G1 so we need an absolute cell reference. To
do that all you have to do is put a $ in front of G and a $
in front of 1 to force that to be a fixed value to that cell. And now when
we copy these down, there's G1, there's G1, there's G1 and there's G1
as well. That is an Absolute Cell Reference. Number 15 - Show Formulas. Often
a spreadsheet gets to the point where you have a number of formulas spread out
all over the place and it's really difficult to look at each one
individually. Wouldn't it be nice if you could see a list of all the formulas all
at once. Go into File, Options,
Advanced and scroll down toward the bottom and there is a "Show formulas in
cells instead of their calculated results". If you check that box and hit OK
it now actually shows all of the formula references for you to view. I'm going to
turn that off. A shortcut method to do that is Ctrl ~ and you can toggle
that on and off. Another option you have is just a double-click on a cell and you
can see the color codes of the reference cells that is being used and the formula
for that cell and those options make it easier to see formulas at a glance.
Number 16 - Text to Columns. When using Excel you'll often find yourself wanting
to copy data from other applications or from a webpage or other source. I have a
set of data in Word. If I copy this and paste it into an Excel spreadsheet
unfortunately it copies it all in as one line and we really want it to break all
of these components out into different columns. That's the whole purpose of
using Excel. So there's a quick way you can convert these. Just highlight them, go
to the Data tab, and click on Text to Columns. Now in this situation you can
choose between Delimited or Fixed Width. These are separated by commas so I'm
going to pick Delimited and I'm going to choose comma and not tab. You'll
notice down here that it knows where the spacing is between each column. Hit
next. you can change some of the formatting if
you want to and when you're done hit Finish and now it separates them into
different columns. Just remember there has to be some delimiter to separate
them out, or if it's fixed width you can choose that as an option too. Number 17 -
Conditional Formatting. You saw a sneak peek of the conditional formatting when
we looked at the Quick Analysis tool earlier but there are more options
available from the menu. Let's say on this table we want to show all of the
entries that have greater than 2000. Just highlight the list and on the Home tab,
choose Conditional Formatting, Select Highlighted Cells Rules, and choose
Greater Than, and enter 2000. Now it has highlighted everything greater than 2000.
if you want to turn that off go back to Conditional Formatting and Clear the
Rules. There's many other options available here. You can show the Top 10%,
you can change Data Bars so you have a visual representation, you can change the
Color Scales for a more visual representation. I particularly like the
Icon Sets and you can even define a new rule and make up all kinds of options to
select what you want. It's very powerful. So give yourself a better representation of
your data through visual and highlighted items using Conditional Formatting.
Number 18 - PowerPivot. PowerPivot is a free feature that's installed as an
add-in in Excel but it's not installed by default. To enable it go to the File,
Options, click on Add-ins, and come down here to the bottom and choose Com
Add-ins and hit Go. You'll see in the list Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel.
Check that box and hit OK and it will add this PowerPivot
tab onto your screen. When you click on that tab you have a whole new
set of features available to you. Now without going into a detailed
explanation of how to use PowerPivot, because you can find that information
elsewhere on other videos, but the bottom line is this tool allows you to connect
to other Oracle or SQL data sources and a variety of other data sets and use
it as a BI tool for large sets of data. In fact, it expands the 1 Million row
limit of Excel to virtually unlimited numbers. It is meant to turn Excel into a
business intelligence analysis tool so take a look. Number 19 - Freeze Panes.
Freeze Panes allows you to lock certain portions of the screen. In this example I
have a large set of data. When I scroll to the right I lose the first column
name information and if I scroll down I lose the header information. To solve
this you can use Freeze Panes. Click on the corner where you want the rows above
and the columns to the left to be locked. Go to View and click Freeze Panes and
choose Freeze Panes from the menu. Now when you scroll right you can see the
names in the left column and when you scroll down you can see the rows in the
heading. To undo the freeze panes just click on it again and click Unfreeze.
Number 20 - Control Arrow Keys. Don't forget to hold down the Ctrl key when
you're arrowing around a set of data. Ctrl right-arrow, down-arrow, left-arrow,
up-arrow. It'll move to the end, beginning, bottom, or top of the data set
that you're working within. Number 21 - 3D References. If you're tracking data over
a period of time it's often common to create a different month tab for each
one of the sets of data and in this case I have September, October, and November.
They are identical in terms of the format but the data is different in each.
Let's say I want to create a total of all of those. I can hold the Ctrl key
down and drag this tab and then rename it to get our Total tab. Let's say we
want to add a heading to the top of each one of these charts. We can add it in and
go into each one of the tabs one at a time but with 3D Referencing all you
have to do is click on one on the end, hold down the Shift key, and click the
other end. Now you've highlighted all four of these tabs. Go ahead and do your
insert, put in your heading, make your changes,
and now when you click on the individual ones you'll see that changes I made
we're done on all four. Now let's take our total and let's use a 3D Reference
to add the quantities from each one of these three tabs into this cell. I'm
gonna hit the Sum. I'm gonna go to the first tab, choose that cell, hold down the
Shift key and select all three and hit Enter. Now that you're on the Total tab
you'll see that it's summed September through November. Now I'm going to just
drag these down, copy them across and you have the total for all three. That is 3D
Referencing. Number 22 - Forecast Sheet. You want a quick peek of the future? So
you've got a set of numbers here that look like they're in a pattern. All you
have to do is highlight that, go to Data, and choose Forecast Sheet. This gives you
a trend line and the forecast, and you can click the up-arrow here to extend it out
for a longer period of time if you want to look farther in the future. That's
just a quick look at the Forecast option for something really simple. Number 23 -
SUMIFS Function. The SUMIFS function allows you to do conditional summing of
data. So in this example I have a table with month, item, and amount. Over here I'm
going to add the sum of the amounts based on this criteria. Entering the SUMIFS
function we just do =SUMIFS and the range is the range of values
that you're summing. The criteria in this first example is the month so we're
going to select the month range and the value we're looking for is right there
and you can see the total is 68 which is the sum of these first three. For this
one we're going to do the same thing
The range is still the values the, criteria that we're selecting for first
is the month, with this being the month. We can continue on with another set of
criteria. Have it be the item, and this is the specific item we're selecting and
you can see 78 is the total of just May Item2's.
And that's the SUMIFS function. Number 24 - IFERROR function. The IFERROR
function can be used to clean up some bad data. For example, I have a formula
here that calculates the per item amount for the quantity and the total. If I copy
this down I get a divided by zero error because the quantity on this line is
zero. Well, the IFERROR function can be used to clean this up. All you have to do
is come in here, add IFERROR in front of your formula, and if that value is an
error then what do you want to do? Let's just put in zero. Now when I copy that
down it puts a zero in there but still calculates the other locations correctly.
And that's a quick fix with the IFERROR function. Number 25 - Filled Maps. Filled
Maps are just like any other chart but way cooler. Take a set of data, highlight
it, make sure you have location specific information in here, which can be a state,
a city, a zipcode, GPS coordinates, or any other location related data elements . Go
to insert and choose Maps. Select this Filled Map and your data elements will
be placed on a map. In this case the United States. You can also add different
chart elements like Data Labels and you can change the chart to different types
of styles. It's a very cool 2016 feature. And that conclude
this video of the top 25 Excel 2016 tips and tricks. Don't forget to check
out the other tips and tricks videos for Outlook, Skype for Business, Word,
PowerPoint, and more coming in the future. Thanks for watching. Hey, if you want to
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