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

Automatic report cleanup

You may find yourself saddled with reports that you need to analyze in Excel that are particularly unfriendly from an analytical standpoint. You may even be manually cleaning up such reports monthly. Or perhaps you’re writing macros in Excel to automate repetitive tasks such at this. I will tell you that I write far fewer macros these days now that Power Query is available.

As we saw in the workbook index example, Power Query offers a code-free approach that is designed to be “set-and-forget.” We're going to transform a January accounting report into an analysis ready format, and then save a February report over it. This will illustrate how once you establish Power Query, the only repetitive step is to run the new report and save over the previous version of the data source.

First, let’s look at some common frustrations that arise in reports that you export to Excel from other software programs.

Analytical obstacles...