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

2. 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

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

4. 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.

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

6. Getting Around: Screen Elements
2010
2007
2003

7. 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

8. 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

9. 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.

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

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

15. 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

16. 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

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

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. Pivot Table

22. Printing
Graphs
Page Layout
Show & Tell

23. 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 -

24. Graphs Come From Tables
© Ted French: About.com -

25. Graphs Come From Tables
© Ted French: About.com -

26. Graphs Come From Tables
© Ted French: About.com -

27. 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

28. Resources http://spreadsheets.about.com/