Book Image

Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures

By : David Ringstrom
Book Image

Exploring Microsoft Excel’s Hidden Treasures

By: David Ringstrom

Overview of this book

David Ringstrom coined the phrase “Either you work Excel, or it works you!” after observing how many users carry out tasks inefficiently. In this book, you’ll learn how to get more done with less effort. This book will enable you to create resilient spreadsheets that are easy for others to use as well, while incorporating spreadsheet disaster preparedness techniques. The time-saving techniques covered in the book include creating custom shortcuts and icons to streamline repetitive tasks, as well as automating them with features such as Tables and Custom Views. You’ll see how Conditional Formatting enables you to apply colors, Cell icons, and other formatting on-demand as your data changes. You’ll be empowered to protect the integrity of spreadsheets and increase usability by implementing internal controls, and understand how to solve problems with What-If Analysis features. In addition, you’ll master new features and functions such as XLOOKUP, Dynamic Array functions, LET and LAMBDA, and Power Query, while learning how to leverage shortcuts and nuances in Excel. By the end of this book, you’ll have a broader awareness of how to avoid pitfalls in Excel. You’ll be empowered to work more effectively in Excel, having gained a deeper understanding of the frustrating oddities that can arise daily in Excel.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
1
Part 1: Improving Accessibility
6
Part 2:Spreadsheet Interactivity and Automation
12
Part 3: Data Analysis

Summary

This chapter led you down a path that started with computing the cubic volume of a box with simple multiplication. Then, we layered on more and more complexity as we made our way to the LET and LAMBDA functions. The phrase game-changing often feels trite, but if you write complex formulas in Excel, both LET and LAMBDA empower you to write formulas today that you won’t cringe at when you see them again in the future. I’ve thought “what planet was I on that day?” more than a few times throughout my career when revisiting formulas that span multiple rows in the Formula Bar area.

We made several stops, including visiting functions such as PRODUCT, IF, CHOOSE, and SWITCH. I included these because of similarities in how you can pass information to the functions, or swap information around as stepping-stones toward LET and LAMBDA. From there, we embarked on creating Names, partly to correlate the similarities between the LET and LAMBDA functions, but...