Advanced Uses Of Microsoft Excel

Many users use Microsoft Excel as a tool for constructing tables and extract reports and charts out of that tabular report. Because of this, Excel has been more or less branded as a calculator that can be used by storing formulas.
But, in reality, Excel can be used for a variety of purposes.

There are many utility functions in Excel that perform a number of utility tasks. Ranking function can be used to rank the collected data based on parameters. This will be very useful if the sheet contains a huge volume of data spanning across thousands of rows. In such a scenario, it will be practically impossible for the user to manually go through the huge data and do the ranking. Just by selecting the data range and by passing the parameter to the ranking function, Excel provides the correct ranking results in a matter of seconds.

There is also a utility called the advanced filter that can be used to take out duplicate rows of data from collected data. If this identification of duplicate rows had to be done by a manual process on a data collection that contains thousands of rows, then it might take a couple of days to complete the activity.
Conditional formatting is another useful function that can be used to identify unique rows such as blank rows in a matter of a few seconds. Conditional formatting can be also be used to filter out certain sections of data that has contains certain special characters.

Excel can also be used to create forms that can be used for filling up questions and answers in the form of a survey. Vlookup is another important utility that can be used to merge data from different sources and create a consolidated collection of data.

Excel Calendar is a function that can be used by business persons to arrive at a particular plan for a month. Though there are free to download Calendar controls available on the net, it will take some time to integrate the calendar controls with Excel software. By making use of the in-built Excel Calendar, one can quickly integrate the planned schedule to the actual progression that is happening and then find out the actual achieved results in comparison with the planned work.

Management Dashboards is another important utility that can be used to provide insightful data to the top people in the company. Overall, Excel has a number of lesser-used functions that could be just the ticket for your next data-based problem.

By: Louisa Coan

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Louisa Coan is writing on behalf of JB Consulting, who deliver computer training throughout England and Wales and offer excel course london and excel course