OCAN Productivity Series: Excel Tips and Tricks to make excel things a little easier 

Premise for Today’s Webinar Using an example of an everyday task, today’s webinar will: Supply you with some terminology and hints to point in the right direction for additional help and clarification Provide a quick, NON-Comprehensive Run-Through of common tips/topics one might employ when looking at, formatting, using, referencing or converting data

Premise for Today’s Webinar Primary Sources (direct links listed where applicable): about.com Microsoft Office Help Fred Pryor Seminar Trial & Error

The Task: Things are heating here in Wayne County – the program is busy in the school, we’ve finally got a student roster to load into WEST, but the data needs to be formatted correctly to get it into the system, and there’s a ton of it to go through. We’ve got a donor interested in setting up a scholarship to the school most that most students are interested in, and we’re interested in knowing what type of colleges our students are interested in, in general. We’ve got tons of data, but not the time to really sift through it. Ultimately, it’d be great to have some charts to show for the work.

Today’s Line Up: Fundamentals Formatting Analysis Show & Tell

Getting Around: Screen Elements 2010 2007 2003

Terminology Ribbon The strip of buttons and icons above the work area Tab Active Cell Worksheet Workbook Marquee Office Button Quick Access Toolbar Status Bar Zoom Dialogue Launcher Formula Bar Name Box Split Tabs The strip of buttons and icons above the work area A collection of functionally-related controls and menus Cell with the black outline; data is always entered there An individual spreadsheet with rows & columns or a chart A file containing multiple worksheets Marks the currently active cell or range Provides access to options such as open, print, etc Stores shortcuts to frequently used features Hosts specific shortcuts and information about a workbook Controls magnification of the screen Launches the associated dialog box Displays the contents of the currently active cell Displays the name of the currently active cell Allows viewing of distant parts of a worksheet at the same time Adapted from a Fred Pryor Seminar resource

Tips for an effective set of data Always create a header row, and format the header row so it’s easily set apart from the rest of the data Do not include any entirely blank rows or columns Do not merge cells within the list Be Consistent – OH or Ohio, not either one throughout Adapted from a Fred Pryor Seminar resource

Differences between versions: PivotTables   Maximum rows displayed in a PivotTable report is 1 million. Maximum columns displayed in a PivotTable report is 16,000. Maximum number of unique items within a single Pivot field is 1 million. Maximum number of fields visible in the Fields list is 16,000. Sorting   Levels increased from 3 to 64. AutoFilter   Drop-down list length changed from 1,000 items to 10,000 items. Maximum formula length   Increased from 1,000 to 8,000. Formula nesting levels   Increased from 7 to 64. Arguments in a function   Increased from 30 to 255. Conditional formats per cell   Increased from 3 to available memory. Unique cell styles in a workbook   Increased from 4,000 to 64,000. Unique colors per workbook   Increased from 56 to 4.3 billion. Characters in a cell that can be displayed and printed   Increased to 32,000.

Formatting Handy formulas for text Zoom Slider Fix width Freeze panes Keyboard friends: Ctrl, Shift, Arrow Zoom Slider Fix width Handy formulas for text Freeze panes Formatting

Handy Keyboard Tricks Shift, CTRL, and the Arrow Keys want to be your best friends Pressing the shift key, and using arrows to move across text, lets you highlight a section of text – whether in Word, Exel, Powerpoint, etc. Try it! In excel, if you add the CTRL key to shift, using the arrows, you can get to the end of a row, column, or the whole table

Handy Keyboard Tricks Give the mouse a rest! Try these shortcuts: Cut = CTRL x Copy = CTRL c Paste = CTRL v Undo = CTRL z Redo = CTRL y Find = CTRL f New (Workbook, Document, Powerpoint) = CTRL n

Handy Text Formulas =PROPER() Converts first letters to capital letters =UPPER() Converts text to all upper case =LOWER() Converts text to all lower case =TRIM() Removes all blank spaces from the left of a character field and left-justifies the text =CONCATENATE() combines values in two or more cells Text to Columns separates values from a single cell into multiple cells

Pivot Tables Analysis Formulas for numbers Sorting and Filtering V-Lookup Pivot Tables Sorting and Filtering Analysis

Analysis Formulas =Count() Counts the number of cells in a range that contain numbers =CountA() Counts the number of cells in a range that are not empty =CountBlank() Counts the number of empty cells in a range =CountIf() Counts the number of cells within a range that meet a given condition =Rows() Gives the number of rows in a selected range

Analysis Formulas =Sum() Counts the number of cells in a range that contain numbers =Average() Counts the number of cells in a range that are not empty =Min() Counts the number of empty cells in a range =Max() Counts the number of cells within a range that meet a given condition

V-LookUp =VLOOKUP (lookup_value, table_array, col_index_number, [range_lookup])

V-LookUp 1. Lookup_value – Think of this field as your starting point. It is the value you are going to search for in the secondary file 2. Table_array – This is the range for your lookup table. The range can be on your existing worksheet or another worksheet. When you click another tab and define the range, Excel prepends that tab name to the range. 3. Col_index_num – This is the number of the column on your lookup table that has the information you need. 4 . Range-lookup – this field defines how close a match should exist between your Lookup_value and the value in the leftmost column on our lookup table. A value of “FALSE” will only show exact matches.

V-LookUp Rules & Caveats for the lookup table (table_array) Rule 1 - The left column must contain the values being referenced. Rule 2 – You do not want duplicates in your lookup table. It will only return the first instance. Rule 3 - When referencing a lookup table, you don’t want your cell references to change when you drag and fill to populate the other cells with the VLOOKUP function.

Pivot Table A PivotTable is an interactive table that quickly summarizes, or cross-tabulates, large amounts of data. You can rotate its rows and columns to see different summaries of the source data, filter the data by displaying different pages, or display the details for areas of interest.

Pivot Table

Printing Graphs Page Layout Show & Tell

Graph-making relies on table-making First, you need a table. The table should have NO blank rows of columns. When laying out your table, list the names describing the data in one column and, to the right of that, the data itself. If there is more than one data series, list them one after the other in columns with the title for each data series at the top. © Ted French: About.com - http://spreadsheets.about.com/od/excelcharts/ss/pie_chart.htm

Graphs Come From Tables © Ted French: About.com - http://spreadsheets.about.com/od/excelcharts/ss/pie_chart.htm

Graphs Come From Tables © Ted French: About.com - http://spreadsheets.about.com/od/excelcharts/ss/column_chart.htm

Graphs Come From Tables © Ted French: About.com - http://spreadsheets.about.com/od/excelcharts/ss/line_graph.htm

Printing Note the Status Bar: Not only does it give you stats about the data (sum, count, average, etc.), but it’s where you can find quick page view options: Normal – just shows all the cells Page Layout shows the margins, or how it will look when printed Page Break Preview - find it annoying when you can seem to fit things on a page? This viewing option allows you to move the page break lines

Resources http://spreadsheets.about.com/ http://www.pryor.com/mkt_info/seminars/desc/x7.asp http://www.exceltip.com/category.html#1