Once you have data in an Excel worksheet, the next step is to extract information out of the data. For example, a teacher may need to know which students got grade A in Maths, an employer may need to know about all the employees who were absent for more than 3 days in a month or a doctor may need to know how the patient responds to a certain medicine.
So you have created a data of your employees including first name, last name, department, salary, etc. You have made sure that the headers stand out and there are no 'empty' columns or rows in your data. You planned to make the data look beautiful and arranged the data in a proper sequence and made sure the data was entered using data validation to avoid unnecessary errors and speed your work. Now comes in the boss and wants to know only about the employees who earn a certain salary per month and wants a printout of the data 'yesterday'. What should you do? Well, use the 'autofilter' feature. After some time the boss wants to know about the employees who draw a certain salary and the department in which they work or the locality where they reside! You can use the 'autofilter' once to filter the data based on the salary (greater than or equal to) and then again 'autofilter' the filtered data based on locality. Or, you can use the advanced filter in Excel.
The doctor can use to find information from Excel sheets when he prescribes a patient blood pressure or sugar reducing medicines. A person trying to lose weight can create an Excel sheet and see how she is progressing. A teacher can easily filter Excel data to find out how her students are progressing in Maths. Later we shall see how charting can help to create a visual information: a picture is worth a thousand words, as the old saying goes.
Have you used 'conditional formatting' in Excel? Then you know how easy it is to highlight different parts of the Excel data based on specific criteria. Now you have highlighted the information you need to see quickly!
You can view these functions in action by following the link to the the free Excel training videos given below.
Till the next article - take care!
What is Excel and how do I use it?
A complete guide to how Microsoft Excel is used.
Creating your own functions in Excel
Creating custom functions in Microsoft Excel can help automate your work.
Using the Function - If - In Excel
How can you perform calculations based on criteria? Use the 'if' function!
