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5 Excel Features to Know Before Getting Into Your First Job

As a student, we hardly get a hand on training on using MS Excel. However, as soon as you enter the corporate world, MS Excel is all some of you may see whole day long.

It is the default tool that thousands/millions of companies use to keep track of or analyse data. Simple tasks such as creating a calendar, managing project timeline, leave management, sales data analysis, effort estimation etc., are often done in Excel.

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Here are five Excel features that you should learn today so that you will have an upper hand when you get into the corporate world.

Pivot Table

Pivot Tables can quickly summarize huge amount of data in a matter of seconds. While you may find a bit of learning curve when using the Pivot Tables first, these are really easy to use and maintain.

Excel Functions

There are ~500 Excel functions and you’re not supposed to know all. Just get a grip on the basic ones (such as VLOOKUP, IF, SUM, COUNT) and you will be ahead of most of the people using Excel.

To give you an example of the power of using Excel function, suppose you have a huge list of all the sales rep in your company and you want to quickly find out the sales done by Steve. You can either go through the entire list of filter it using the name Steve, or you can use the power of VLOOKUP function that would instantly fetch the sales value for Steve. What's even better is that this result is dynamic. So if you change the name of Steve with Brad, it will give you the sales numbers of Brad

Cool.. isn't it

Click here to see a is detailed explanation on how to use Excel VLOOKUP Function.

Charting

When you have to present your reports to the management, showing them raw data would not work. You need to make it visually appealing and easy to consume at the same time. There are many charts in Excel that you can use to represent your data in an easy to understand format.

Data Analysis Tools

There are many data analysis tools in Excel that can save you a lot of time. These include options to filter data, sort data, remove duplicates, text to column, etc. When you work with a lot of data, you get it in different formats and issues. These data analysis tools help you in quickly clean the data and make it available in the consistent format.

Conditional Formatting

Conditional Formatting is an easy way to give a visual layer to you data. For example, if you have the sales numbers for 100 sales rep, it will quickly highlight the top 10 reps by sales value and bottom 10 reps by sales value. There are many such variations that you can use and even add some cool icons (arrows, Harvey bubbles, traffic lights) to it.

While Excel is huge and becoming proficient in Excel can take months (or even years), if you get yourself familiarize with these basics, it will instantly give you head start when you get into the corporate world.