While MS Excel can be a great tool to automate your work, save loads of time and make your work flexible, there are certain things that you need to keep in mind to avoid unnecessary complications.
Excel doesn’t recognize date formats such as 23.09.2019. Applying formulas, filtering data in tables that have dates, work only when dates are entered as 23/09/2019 instead.
Use Ctrl+H to replace ‘.’ With ‘/’
Excel provides a variety of charts for a reason, but not every chart is suitable for every data.
When analyzing market share, the pie chart is more informative than the line chart.
While when showing GDP growth, the line chart is more relevant than the pie chart.
Moreover, pie charts can show only one set of data at a time. Here, the line chart shows the GDP growth of both the countries in the same chart, which also helps in analyzing as to which country is performing better. Whereas two pie charts need to be created for different countries and the information is not even clear. (Pie chart only for Country A is shown in the picture)
When creating formulas, not fixing cells with ‘$’, is like wasting one of the key functions of Excel. It helps you keep some inputs in the formula constant while you’re dragging it across the sheet, say per unit revenue in the video below without having to type the formula again for different months.
Pivot is a great tool to summarize data in excel. However, merging cells in the table refrains us from making full use of the same by giving blank cells for merged cells.
When working with huge data, it is always advisable to freeze column and row headings when moving anywhere across the sheet.