An excerpt from Burning Glass Technologies, specializing in a real-time portrait of the labour market demand:
“Despite being over 30 years old, Microsoft Excel’s popularity in business is growing exponentially, and with 82% of jobs now reported to require digital productivity skills such as proficiency in Excel, it simply cannot be ignored as an important skill for employability.”
This edition of Tips & Tricks, therefore, is devoted to showing some time-saving tips of Microsoft’s premier electronic spreadsheet. Grab a coffee, sit back, and enjoy the tips!
Data Types
Let’s imagine that you need to create a population report for the major cities of the world, and you don’t have a lot of time. Try this:
- open Excel to a blank worksheet.
- Duplicate the following info as per the screenshot below:
3. Select the 3 cells with city names in them (A2:A4).
4. Click the Data tab on the ribbon, then scroll in the Data Types group and select Geography. You should get banner icons preceding each city name.
5. While the city names are still highlighted, click the Insert Data screen tip floating above, and from the Field list select Population. Excel will fill the population placeholders with live data. Pretty cool!
On one condition…
Conditional formatting is a way of maintaining a real-time status on your data. For example, if sales amounts fall below a specific range, you might like Excel to emphasize these areas for obvious improvements. Conditional formatting is also a must for future employees to keep in their skill set.
In the example used, an employee is tasked with alerting the manager to sales amounts that don’t meet acceptable levels. Assuming $500,000 is company policy, follow the steps below to display all numbers not meeting this quota:
- Select the entire Sales column data.
- Click Conditional Formatting on the Home tab.
- Click Highlight Cells Rules.
- Click the Less Than option, type 500000 into the value placeholder, and select the formatting option, as below:
As you can see, several salespeople in this scenario will have to ‘bust their butts’ in order to stay employed!
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