Category: Excel®

AI chat can enable average users to accomplish more complex Excel analysis and calculations than ever before. They are powerful tools for filling knowledge gaps and offering solutions to novel problems.

Quickly see that the haters (very reasonably) base their dislike on the difficulty of creating PivotTables, and on not finding them useful when they do. The PivotTable likers, by contrast, rave about how easily it analyzes otherwise difficult-to-manage data.

Did you know that the Excel application has been around since 1985? As an almost 40 year old program, Excel has added not only calculation tools and functionality over the years, it has also invested in solid user experience and quality-of-life useability improvements.

It’s not an exaggeration to say that Excel is the most-used business software tool in the world. Some have even described it as the “Swiss Army Knife” of business analytics, but whether you use the blade or the spork, all users benefit from learning keyboard shortcuts that keeps their hands on the keyboard.

We all use hyperlinks every day. That clickable, sometimes underlined, sometimes blue text has come to be as familiar as text itself. And while they might not be as common in Excel, there are many uses for hyperlinks within a workbook as well.

As Excel develops more ways to complete tasks, it is even more important to find shortcuts that accelerate our work. Excel's Find and Replace feature is a powerful tool that allows users to quickly search for specific data and replace it with new values throughout an entire workbook.

The “new” XLOOKUP function was introduced in Excel 2021 and Office 365, and improves upon the heavily used VLOOKUP function in several ways. Let’s start by reviewing the syntax and an example of each function to understand the differences, starting with VLOOKUP.

Definitions of what Excel tasks are considered “basic”, “advanced”, “intermediate” and in between can vary from company to company or industry to industry. An accounting firm, for example, may consider specific accounting functions, VLOOKUP and INDEX/MATCH “basic” tools for the job while an HR department might consider these unnecessary but require knowledge of Power Query and advanced conditional formatting.

Microsoft Excel is one of the most widely used applications in the business world. It is an essential tool for organizing and analyzing data, and being proficient in its use is a necessary skill for many jobs.

When it comes to storing, analyzing and visualizing data, Microsoft Excel is the preferred choice. But, when the source of the data you need to analyze is contained within a PDF file, your first step is going to be getting it into Excel.