Category: Excel®

The Portable Document Format, known best by its acronym and file type “PDF”, was developed by Adobe Systems in 1993 and has remained the standard for consumer printing, publishing and electronic sharing ever since. It is no wonder, then, that every now and then the need to convert information stored in a PDF into an Excel worksheet comes up. Powerful tools are destined to collaborate.

Your event planning company is preparing for a large company meeting. Managers from each department have been tasked with gathering and reporting meal orders, chosen from six meal options, into a shared event spreadsheet. This is the form you sent and the list of meal options offered:

If you use Excel through an Office 365 subscription, you know that new features appear regularly throughout the year. Because of this ‘trickle’ you might easily miss something new and useful, especially if your updates take place automatically in the background.

There’s a moment in everyone’s experience with Excel when you are both fairly comfortable using the tool and at the same time recognize just how much more there is to learn! This is often at the point where you want to take on a new task and realize that tools you need aren’t already in your toolbox.

If you are looking for a job, or hoping to move to a better one, you’re probably doing all the right things: Networking, updating your social presence on LinkedIn, honing your resume. But are you also improving your skills? And in particular, are your Excel skills where they need to be?

Microsoft Excel is the most popular spreadsheet tool in use today, so it is likely that you will answer at least some questions about this important program during interviews. This is true whether you are looking for work as a senior manager or an intern.

Why is this mentioned in a post about Freezing Rows? Imagine trying to read a sheet with the headers 1000 rows above the data you are looking at.

When you start learning Excel, you begin by using the simplest methods for entering data and creating calculations. It is a credit to the software that so many tasks are able to be performed by the most inexperienced of users right from the beginning of their training.

We’ve all done it.  Mis-clicked. Mis-typed. Hit enter when we meant to hit tab. And while it’s frustrating to make mistakes in a spreadsheet of our own data, when managing important company assets those mistakes can have expensive consequences.

Information in today’s corporate environment is as important as raw materials are to a manufacturer or labor is to the service industry. Organizations collect data from consumers, vendors, employees and even competitors every day.