- What Are The Features Of Excel
- What Are The Features Of Excel Cell
- Spreadsheet Features And Functions
- Microsoft Excel Features And Functions
- What Are The Features Of Excel Automatically
- Unique Features Of Excel
- Features of Microsoft Excel 1. Add Header and Footer MS Excel allows us to keep the header and footer in our spreadsheet document.
- At the heart of any Excel spreadsheet are the numbers within the data. Using basic math functions to manipulate those numbers is one of the features that makes Excel so powerful. Simple calculations can be entered into the formula bar in Excel just as they would be written on paper. As with all formulae in Excel, start a calculation with the.
Excel. Chances are, that word alone inspires visions of lengthy spreadsheets, complicated macros, and the occasional pivot table or bar graph.
Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet developed by Microsoft for Windows, macOS, Android and iOS. It features calculation, graphing tools, pivot tables, and a macro programming language called.
It’s true—with more than one billion Microsoft Office users globally, Excel has become the professional standard in offices across the globe for pretty much anything that requires management of large amounts of data.
But, if you think Excel is only good for making you cross-eyed while looking at a bunch of numbers and financial reports, think again. As Tomasz Tunguz points out, there are tons of uses of Excel in business (and beyond) outside of simple spreadsheets. In fact, the potential uses are seemingly endless.
There’s no way for us to compile a list that captures every one of Excel’s possible applications (even if you were up for reading a War and Peace-sized listicle).
However, in an effort to demonstrate the power and flexibility of everybody’s favorite spreadsheet tool, we’ve pulled together different ways that you could use Excel—both professionally, personally, and just for the fun of it.
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Start free courseAll about numbers
Of course, the core purpose of Excel all boils down to numbers. If you need to sort, retrieve, and analyze a large (or even small!) amount of data, Excel makes it a breeze.
Here are a few broad categories to keep in mind when it comes to implementing Excel for anything numbers-related.
1. Calculating
Find yourself running the same calculations over and over again? Build yourself a totally customized calculator in Excel by programming your commonly-used formulas. That way, you just need to punch in your digits and Excel will spit the answer out for you—no elbow grease required.
2. Accounting
Budget plans, forecasts, expense tracking, financial reports, loan calculators, and more. Excel was pretty much designed to meet these different accounting needs. And, considering that 89 percent of companies utilize Excel for its various accounting functions, it obviously fits the bill.
Excel even has numerous different spreadsheet templates to make all of those processes that much easier.
3. Charting
Pie charts, scatter charts, line charts, bar charts, area charts, column charts—the list goes on and on. If you need to find a way to represent data in a more visual and digestible way, Excel’s ability to transform rows and columns of digits into beautiful charts is sure to become one of your favorite things about it.
Want more information about the types of charts you can create in Excel? This article is a helpful resource.
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4. Inventory tracking
Tracking inventory can be a headache. Fortunately, Excel can help to keep employees, business owners, or even individuals organized and on top of their inventory—before any major problems crop up.
Making a plan
Let’s move on from the numbers—there are plenty of things that Excel can help you plan and organize that don’t necessarily involve endless rows of digits.
5. Calendars and schedules
Need to map out a content calendar for your blog or website? Lesson plans for your classroom? A PTO schedule for you and all of your co-workers? A daily schedule for you or your family? When it comes to various calendars, Excel can be surprisingly robust.
6. Seating charts
From a large corporate luncheon to a wedding, arranging a seating chart can be a royal headache. Fortunately, Excel can make it a total breeze. If you’re a real whiz, you’ll be able to automatically create your seating chart using your spreadsheet of RSVPs. Need help getting this done? This article provides a detailed walkthrough of how you can create a seating chart in Excel.
7. Goal planning worksheet
From professional goals to fitness goals to financial goals, it helps to have something to keep you focused and on track. Enter the beauty of Excel. Using the tool, you can create various worksheets, logs, and planning documents to help you monitor your progress—and, hopefully, cross the finish line.
8. Mock-ups
Excel might not be the first platform you think of when it comes to design. But, believe it or not, you can use the tool to put together various mock-ups and prototypes. In fact, it’s a surprisingly popular choice for creating website wireframes and dashboards.
Getting stuff done
Want to kick your productivity into high gear? Well, Excel can swoop in and save the day with a variety of uses that can help you tackle your tasks and to-dos with ease and organization.
9. Task list
Say goodbye to your standard pen and paper to-do list. With Excel, you can make a far more robust task list—and even track your progress on those larger to-dos that are currently on your plate.
10. Checklist
Similarly, you can create a simple checklist that allows you to tick off the things you’ve purchased or accomplished—from a grocery list to a roster of to-dos for an upcoming marketing campaign.
11. Project management charts
We’ve already touched on the fact that Excel is a total beast when it comes to creating charts. And, this concept holds true when it comes to various charts for project management.
From waterfall charts to manage your team’s progress to kanban style boards (just like Trello!) to keep things organized, there are tons of ways that Excel can help keep your project on track.
![What Are The Features Of Excel What Are The Features Of Excel](https://qainsights.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/Microsoft-Excel-2013-Features-Functions.png)
12. Time logs
You know that tracking time can be a huge asset to you and your productivity. While there are plenty of fancy apps and tools to help meet that need, you can think of Excel as the original tool for logging your time. And, it still serves as a suitable option today.
Involving other people
Need to collect information from other people? Survey tools and forms are one option. But, rest assured, you can also create your own in Excel.
13. Forms
From simple to complicated, Excel is a great option for creating forms. You can even program various drop-down menus so that users can select their choice from a pre-set list.
14. Quizzes
Trying to test somebody else’s—or even your own—knowledge of a subject? In Excel, you can create a bank of questions and answers in one worksheet, and then instruct Excel to quiz you in another.
Staying in touch
Managing relationships is crucial to your success both professionally and personally. Fortunately, Excel makes it easy to keep in touch.
15. CRM
Need a lightweight CRM to stay top of mind for your customers? You can make one in Excel. And, the best part? Building your own means it will be totally customizable. Sales Hacker also put together a nifty set of free sales excel templates you can use to help get started!
16. Mailing list
Data doesn’t just have to involve numbers. Excel is also great at managing and sorting large amounts of names and addresses—making it the perfect solution for your invite list for that company holiday party or the mailing list for that large promotion or campaign.
Using Excel, you can also mail merge—which makes it that much easier to print address labels and other necessary materials.
You can also apply a similar concept to create things like directories, RSVP lists, and other rosters that involve a large amount of information about people.
Just for fun
Excel doesn’t need to be all work and no play. There are plenty of other fun things you can create using the spreadsheet tool.
17. Historical logs
What Are The Features Of Excel
Whether you want to keep track of the various craft beers you’ve tasted, the workouts you’ve completed, or something else entirely, you can think of Excel as your go-to resource for keeping those things sorted and logged.
18. Sudoku puzzles
Love Sudoku puzzles? As it turns out, you can make your own in Excel. Or, if you find yourself stuck on a particularly challenging one, you can enlist the help of Excel to help you get it figured out!
Need help creating the Sudoku solver and generator? This post will get you well on your way!
19. Word cloud
Word clouds might not be the most scientific representations of data. But, they’re a fun (not to mention beautiful way) to gain an understanding of what words are being utilized most. You guessed it—you can create one using Excel. Here’s how to use information from Excel to create a word cloud in Wordle.
20. Art and animations
The capabilities of Excel likely extend far beyond what you’d initially anticipate. In fact, many people have used the tool to create some downright awesome art—from pixelated portraits to animations.
21. Trip planner
Have a vacation coming up? Make sure you have everything covered by creating yourself a helpful itinerary before you pack your bags and head out. Excel even has a handy trip planner template you can use to make sure you don’t miss anything (from your budget to airline information!).
Over to you
This might seem like a lengthy list. But, rest assured, it barely scratches the surface of all of the different things—aside from simple spreadsheets—that Excel is capable of. From lists to charts to design mock-ups, the different uses of Excel are seemingly limitless.
Feeling intimidated? Don’t worry - you can learn Excel online, all at your own pace, and become a spreadsheet ninja in no time.
Do you have something cool you like to create using Excel? Let us know in the comments!
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Start free courseThe Top 10 Excel Features
Every Excel user has a favourite tip. So we decided to bring some method, data, and science to bear in this hotly debated topic, and to come up with the Top 10 Excel Features.
We consulted the research of 30 of the world’s leading Excel experts as well as our own internal Excel experts. We then grouped up and consolidated the emerging features, and applied a scoring methodology and index to produce a definitive ordered list of the 100 most useful Excel features, hacks, tips and tricks.
These are the top 10 Excel features as determined by our ranking.
What Are The Features Of Excel Cell
Skills are ranked by usefulness and given a score out of 100. Each skill also has a difficulty rating (out of 5) based on the complexity and sophistication of the feature. Finally, we provide the average time in minutes it takes the average learner to go from no knowledge to proficient.
1. Conditional Formatting
Utility: 100 | Difficulty: 3 | Learn in 180 mins
Making sense of our data-rich, noisy world is hard but vital. That’s why the first of our Top 10 Excel Features is so important. Used well, Conditional Formatting brings out the patterns of the universe, as captured by your spreadsheet. That’s why Excel experts and Excel users alike vote this the #1 most important feature. This can be sophisticated. But even the most straightforward colour changes can be hugely beneficial. Suppose you have volumes sold by sales staff each month. Just three clicks can reveal the top 10% performing salespeople and tee up a meaningful business conversation.
2. PivotTables
Utility: 95 | Difficulty: 3 | Learn in 240 mins
What company made call of duty. At four hours to get to proficiency, you may be put off learning PivotTables, but don’t be. Use them to sort, count, total or average data stored in one large spreadsheet and display them in a new table, cut however you want. That’s the critical thing here. If you want to look only at sales figures for specific countries, product lines, or marketing channels, it’s trivial. Warning: make sure your data is clean first!
3. Paste Special
Utility: 88 | Difficulty: 3 | Learn in 10 mins
Grabbing (i.e. Copying) some data from one cell and pasting it into another cell is one of the most common activities in Excel. But there’s a lot you might copy (formatting, value, formula, comments, etc.) and sometimes you won’t want to copy all of it. The most common example of this is where you want to lose the formatting – the place this data is going is your own spreadsheet with your own styling.
4. Add Multiple Rows
Utility: 87 | Difficulty: 0 | Learn in 10 mins
Probably one of the most frequently carried out activities in spreadsheeting. Ctrl-Shift + is the shortcut, but actually, it takes longer, so Right Click is what we recommend. If you want to add more than one, select as many rows or columns as you’d like to add and then Right Click and add.
5. Absolute References
Utility: 85 | Difficulty: 2 | Learn in 15 mins
Indispensable! The dollar in front of the letter fixes the column, the dollar sign in front of number fixes the row F4 toggles through the four possible combinations.
6. Print Optimisation
Utility: 84 | Difficulty: 3 | Learn in 120 mins
Everyone has problems printing from Excel. But just imagine if what you printed were always just what you intended to print. It IS actually possible. There are a few components to this though: print preview, fit to one page, adjusting margins, print selection, printing headers, portrait vs landscape and spreadsheet design. Invest the time to get comfortable with it. You’ll be carrying out this task many, many times in your working life.
7. Extend formula across/down
Utility: 84 | Difficulty: 1 | Learn in 5 mins
The beauty of Excel is its easy scalability. Get the formula right once and Excel will churn out the right calculation a million times. The + crosshair is handy. Double clicking it will take it all the way down if you have continuous data. Sometimes a copy and paste (either regular paste or paste formulas) will be faster for you.
8. Flash Fill
Spreadsheet Features And Functions
Utility: 84 | Difficulty: 2 | Learn in 30 mins
Excel developed a mind of its own in 2013. Say you have two columns of names and you need to construct email addresses from them all. Just do it for the first row and Excel will work out what you mean and do it for the rest. Pre-2013 this was possible but relied on a combination of functions (FIND, LEFT, &, etc). This is much faster and WILL impress people.
9. INDEX-MATCH
Utility: 82 | Difficulty: 4 | Learn in 45 mins
Microsoft Excel Features And Functions
This is one of the most powerful combinations of Excel functions. You can use it to look up a value in a big table of data and return a corresponding value in that table. Let’s say your company has 10,000 employees and there’s a spreadsheet with all of them in it with lots of information about them like salary, start date, line manager, etc. But you have a team of 20 and you’re only really interested in them. INDEX-MATCH will look up the value of your team members (these need to be unique like email or employee number) in that table and return the desired information for your team. This is worth getting your head around this as it is more flexible and therefore more powerful than VLOOKUPs.
10. Filters
Utility: 81 | Difficulty: 2 | Learn in 60 mins
What Are The Features Of Excel Automatically
Explore data in a table quickly. Filtering effectively hides data that is not of interest. Usually, there’s a value e.g. ‘Blue cars’ that you’re looking for and Filters will bring up those and hide the rest. But in more modern versions of Excel, you can now also filter on number values (e.g. is greater than, top 10%, etc), and cell color. Filtering becomes more powerful when you need to filter more than one column in combination e.g. both colors and vehicles to find your blue car.
Unique Features Of Excel
This article was originally published on Business Insider.