After years of using Excel in a
corporate environment here are my top 25 Excel 2016 tips and tricks. Welcome to Sele training. I'm about to
show you some useful tips and tricks for Excel 2016. They're in no particular
order so be sure to watch all the way through to the end of the video. These
tips and tricks have made me more productive and I'm sure they'll make you
more productive as well. Take a moment and click the Subscribe button on the
bottom right of this screen or at the end of the video click on my smiling
face and as always like, share, comment, ask me questions. I'm happy to answer
every question that I receive. Now let's get started. Number 1 - Quick Analysis
Tool. Most people aren't aware of the Quick Analysis tool. When you highlight
any table, in the bottom right-corner is an icon. This is the Quick Analysis tool
menu. If you click on that it gives you a wealth of options you can choose from. To
modify your table for example, I can click on Totals. Click Sum and it shows
the sum of the columns. You can click this sum and it sums the rows. You can
also do formatting on the table, add icons, create charts and insert them into
your spreadsheet, turn it into a table, and add sparklines. There's so much
available here and it makes it quick and easy to avoid going through the menus
and manually inserting each one of these different options onto your table. Number
2 - Filter. if you're not using filter you should be.
It's very simple. Just click anywhere inside of a table of data, go to the Data
tab, click this Filter icon, and it creates a filter at the top of each one
of the columns. When you click on one of these it shows you all the unique
values listed anywhere in that column and you can turn them off. Select one in
particular or two or three or as many as you like. Hit OK and it filters out only
those rows of data that matched that filter. It's a great way to manage large
lists of information. Number 3 - Drop-Down Lists. Say you want to select a
list of values like 1 2 3 4 and you want it to be selectable from this column
right here. Go to the Data tab, click on Data
Validation, and choose List from the menu choice. In the source select the choices
that you want to make available and hit Enter. Make sure this in cell drop-down
checkbox is checked and hit OK. Now when you're in this column and you hit the
down arrow it gives you those four choices to choose from. If you try to
type something that is outside of that range it gives you a warning that the
value doesn't match the list. Number 4 - AutoFit Column Width.
This is by far the quickest way to adjust the width on your columns. Just go
to the space between columns so your cursor turns to this shape and double
click. It'll automatically readjust the size of the columns to fit the widest
point of the data anywhere in that entire column. You can also highlight all
of the columns, click on any one of them the same way, and it will do multiple
columns at the same time. Number 5 - Transpose. Let's say you want to reverse
the columns and rows in a table. All you have to do is highlight the entire set of
data, right-click, copy, choose the location where you want to place the
results, click Paste Special, and check this box
Transpose, and hit OK. Now all the columns and rows have been reversed. Number 6 -
Remove Duplicates. Removing duplicates is handy if you have a list of names or
other information where there's duplicates and you want to end up with a
unique set of values. In this example I'm gonna highlight this list, click on Data,
choose Remove Duplicates. The columns are selected - first name, last name, and amount and in this case I'm going to hit OK to remove the duplicates where all three of
those columns match. That should be true for row 3 and row 8 and as you can
see it removes the 1 duplicate value. Now let's do the same thing but in this case
we're not going to do the amount and we're only going to do it where the
first name and the last name are exactly the same. It now removed two
duplicates. Now be sure to use this Remove Duplicates when the results are
going to be removed. If you just want a filter you should use the Filter as we
looked at earlier because this one deletes the data that is duplicates.
Number 7 - Goal Seek. Goal Seek is an advanced function in Excel and is part
of the What-if Analysis tools. In this example say we have a number of items
that we sell. We know how many the quantity that we've sold of the first
two items and the price each and what the total dollar amount is but for the
third item we want to know how many of these we need to sell in order to get
the overall total to $6,000. Well, you can punch in numbers right here randomly to
try to figure that out and then keep working it until you get to a number
that matches the 6000 that you're targeting but you can also use the
What-if Analysis to figure it out for you. To use Goal Seek you want to start
by clicking on the target cell, go to Data, What-if Analysis, and choose
Goal Seek. It fills in the target cell as your Set Cell. The value we're trying
to reach is 6000 and the cell we're going to change is the quantity for Item3. When you hit OK it goes through and calculates 197 as
the magic number to reach that goal of 6000 total. Just be aware that you can
use your imagination to come up with all kinds of scenarios for the What-if
Analysis using Goal Seek. It handles very complex solutions. Number 8 - VLOOKUP.
VLOOKUP is a very commonly used tool to find data in a list. In this example I
have a list of names with an associated ID. Over here I'm creating a new table
and I want to reference the names in this table to look up the ID from this
list and fill them in. To do that I want to use the VLOOKUP function. Click on the
insert function button and you want to find VLOOKUP in the list. You can type it
in, do a search against all and once it's there select it and it brings up the
function arguments. To remind you of what you fill in, for each one of these
there's a description down here. The lookup value is what value do I want to
look up in the list, and that is the name Nancy. The list that I'm going to choose
from is the entire list and the Column Index Number is the column that I want
to return the value from. In this case this is column 1 and this is column
2 so I'm going to choose column 2. And finally, the range lookup is either
True or False. If you use True it looks for the closest match. False is an
exact match and in almost every situation you want to use False. Hit OK
and you can see that it looked up Nancy in the table and found the ID and
returned it over here. All we have to do then, let's copy this data down. Now
you'll notice right here Carol isn't in the list so it returns an N/A. Now also note
that there is an HLOOKUP function which is horizontal instead of vertical so if
you're looking up something in a different format you may need to use the
HLOOKUP but it essentially has the same parameters. The beauty of the
VLOOKUP function is if you change a value it will update it automatically in
the table. Number 9 - Flash and Auto Fill. Flash
Fill and Auto Fill are slightly different. In this example we have some email
addresses and they fit the format of first name dot last name throughout the
list. If you start typing the name, because you want to pull it out of the
email address, Flash Fill automatically detects the pattern that you're using
and it recommends a solution to fill it in for you. So you can hit enter and it
fills those in for the remainder. Auto Fill is also based on patterns so if
you put a number in, for example, and you use the right corner and drag it down, it
auto fills those numbers in there. Now if I did 1, 2 and selected both and then
drag it down it sees the pattern and automatically
increments by one each time. You can do the same thing with dates, with months.
Just remember there has to be a detectable pattern and to use the
correct option on the corners. So if you type something in and you drag it, it's
gonna copy it. If you type something in and you double-click it fills it in
automatically, matching up with the left column next to it. And if you define a
pattern make sure you highlight both or more and then drag. Flash Fill and
Auto Fill are both really good at making you more efficient when typing information
in. Number 10 - Paste Special Values. Paste Special Values is a handy tool to use if
you have a bunch of data with formulas and you just want to copy all of that
information over to another location and get rid of all those formulas. So you can
see on this I have a formula that adds B and C together into a full name. I have a
formula that does a divided-by for the percentage on this and if I want to just
take those things and remove them and copy this to another location so I just
am left with the data, all you have to do is highlight, Copy, pick a new location,
and do Paste Special. In the list choose Values and hit OK. Now you'll notice when
I highlight these there's no formulas. It's just the value of the data. You'll
find this to be more common than you'd think because often times you want to
remove all that formula and formatting and use the data in a different way
and this is a quick function to help you do that. Number 11 - Images in Charts.
it's real simple to spice up a chart with images. I've created a bar chart
from a set of data. If you come into the chart and click at least a couple of
times to bring up the Format. Click on this Fill & Line icon. go under Fill
and there is a Picture or Texture Fill option. If you select that, you can pick
from a file and choose an image and it will fill that image in on your chart in
place of the normal texture. Number 12 - IF function. The IF function is
very handy if you want to do conditional data representation. For example in this
chart I have a column ABCD, a column with numbers. Some of those numbers are
greater than 10 and some are less. I want to create an IF function to determine
when these numbers are greater than 10 and say "BIG" and if they're less than 10
I want to say "SMALL" so I click on the Fx. Type in IF, choose All, and do Go
to search for it. Bring up the IF function. The first parameter it asks for is the
logical test. What we want to know is if this number is greater than 10. If that's
true we want to print "BIG" and if it's false we want to print "SMALL". Ht okay and there you have your answer. I'm going to copy this down to the other ones and now I can see the one that's small. Number 13 -
Insert Screenshot. If you want to insert a screenshot onto your excel page go up
to the Insert tab, click on Illustrations, and go to Screenshot. It will show a list
of active screens from other applications. Select the one you want and
it inserts the image onto the page. You can then adjust the sizing however you
want and you can also come up to the Crop and crop out portions of the image. Number 14 - Absolute Cell Reference. Excel uses two types of referencing - relative and absolute. As you can see on this
chart C4 times D4 takes the quantity times the cost and gives a
result. This is a relative cell reference because as I look down the list it's
referring to the second one to the left and the first one to the left in the
formula. The Total is also a relative cell reference because it is showing E4
minus F4, the discount. And as you move down the list it's referring to the one
to the second left and the one to the left in the formula. Now if I was to add
a discount in here the formula would be this number times this number and this is a
relative cell reference reflecting the one to the left times this one up here.
The problem is is when I copy this down this one shouldn't be pointing to this
number times G2 because there's nothing in G2. We want it to stay G1 so
we need an absolute cell reference. To do that all you have to do is put a
$ in front of G and a $ in front of 1 to force that to be
a fixed value to that cell. And now when we copy these down,
there's G1, there's G1, there's G1 and there's G1 as well. That is an Absolute Cell
Reference. Number 15 - Show Formulas. Often a spreadsheet gets to the point where
you have a number of formulas spread out all over the place and it's really
difficult to look at each one individually. Wouldn't it be nice if you
could see a list of all the formulas all at once. Go into File, Options, Advanced and scroll down toward the
bottom and there is a "Show formulas in cells instead of their calculated
results". If you check that box and hit OK it now actually shows all of the formula
references for you to view. I'm going to turn that off. A shortcut method to do
that is Ctrl ~ and you can toggle that on and off. Another option you have
is just a double-click on a cell and you can see the color codes of the reference
cells that is being used and the formula for that cell and those options make it
easier to see formulas at a glance. Number 16 - Text to Columns. When using
Excel you'll often find yourself wanting to copy data from other applications or
from a webpage or other source. I have a set of data in Word. If I copy this and
paste it into an Excel spreadsheet unfortunately it copies it all in as one
line and we really want it to break all of these components out into different
columns. That's the whole purpose of using Excel. So there's a quick way you
can convert these. Just highlight them, go to the Data tab, and click on Text to
Columns. Now in this situation you can choose between Delimited or Fixed Width.
These are separated by commas so I'm going to pick Delimited and I'm going
to choose comma and not tab. You'll notice down here that it knows where the
spacing is between each column. Hit next.
you can change some of the formatting if you want to and when you're done hit
Finish and now it separates them into different columns. Just remember there
has to be some delimiter to separate them out, or if it's fixed width you can
choose that as an option too. Number 17 - Conditional Formatting. You saw a sneak
peek of the conditional formatting when we looked at the Quick Analysis tool
earlier but there are more options available from the menu. Let's say on
this table we want to show all of the entries that have greater than 2000. Just
highlight the list and on the Home tab, choose Conditional Formatting, Select
Highlighted Cells Rules, and choose Greater Than, and enter 2000. Now it has
highlighted everything greater than 2000. if you want to turn that off go back to
Conditional Formatting and Clear the Rules. There's many other options
available here. You can show the Top 10%, you can change Data Bars so you have a
visual representation, you can change the Color Scales for a more visual
representation. I particularly like the Icon Sets and you can even define a new
rule and make up all kinds of options to select what you want. It's very powerful.
So give yourself a better representation of your data through visual and highlighted
items using Conditional Formatting. Number 18 - PowerPivot. PowerPivot is a
free feature that's installed as an add-in in Excel but it's not installed
by default. To enable it go to the File, Options, click on Add-ins, and come down
here to the bottom and choose Com Add-ins and hit Go. You'll see in the
list Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel. Check that box and hit OK and it will add this PowerPivot tab onto your screen. When you
click on that tab you have a whole new set of features available to you. Now
without going into a detailed explanation of how to use PowerPivot,
because you can find that information elsewhere on other videos, but the bottom
line is this tool allows you to connect to other Oracle or SQL data sources
and a variety of other data sets and use it as a BI tool for large sets of data.
In fact, it expands the 1 Million row limit of Excel to virtually unlimited
numbers. It is meant to turn Excel into a business intelligence analysis tool so
take a look. Number 19 - Freeze Panes. Freeze Panes allows you to lock certain
portions of the screen. In this example I have a large set of data. When I scroll
to the right I lose the first column name information and if I scroll down I
lose the header information. To solve this you can use Freeze Panes. Click on
the corner where you want the rows above and the columns to the left to be locked.
Go to View and click Freeze Panes and choose Freeze Panes from the menu. Now
when you scroll right you can see the names in the left column and when you
scroll down you can see the rows in the heading. To undo the freeze panes just
click on it again and click Unfreeze. Number 20 - Control Arrow Keys. Don't
forget to hold down the Ctrl key when you're arrowing around a set of data.
Ctrl right-arrow, down-arrow, left-arrow, up-arrow. It'll move to the end,
beginning, bottom, or top of the data set that you're working within. Number 21 - 3D
References. If you're tracking data over a period of time it's often common to
create a different month tab for each one of the sets of data and in this case
I have September, October, and November. They are identical in terms of the
format but the data is different in each. Let's say I want to create a total of
all of those. I can hold the Ctrl key down and drag this tab and then rename
it to get our Total tab. Let's say we want to add a heading to the top of each
one of these charts. We can add it in and go into each one of the tabs one at a
time but with 3D Referencing all you have to do is click on one on the end,
hold down the Shift key, and click the other end. Now you've highlighted all
four of these tabs. Go ahead and do your insert, put in your heading, make your
changes, and now when you click on the individual
ones you'll see that changes I made we're done on all four. Now let's take
our total and let's use a 3D Reference to add the quantities from each one of
these three tabs into this cell. I'm gonna hit the Sum. I'm gonna go to the
first tab, choose that cell, hold down the Shift key and select all three and hit
Enter. Now that you're on the Total tab you'll see that it's summed September
through November. Now I'm going to just drag these down, copy them across and you have the total for all three. That is 3D Referencing. Number 22 - Forecast Sheet. You want a quick peek of the future? So you've got a set of numbers here that
look like they're in a pattern. All you have to do is highlight that, go to Data,
and choose Forecast Sheet. This gives you a trend line and the forecast, and you can
click the up-arrow here to extend it out for a longer period of time if you want
to look farther in the future. That's just a quick look at the Forecast option
for something really simple. Number 23 - SUMIFS Function. The SUMIFS function
allows you to do conditional summing of data. So in this example I have a table
with month, item, and amount. Over here I'm going to add the sum of the amounts
based on this criteria. Entering the SUMIFS function we just do =SUMIFS
and the range is the range of values that you're summing. The criteria in this
first example is the month so we're going to select the month range and the
value we're looking for is right there and you can see the total is 68 which is
the sum of these first three. For this one we're going to do the same thing The range is still the values the,
criteria that we're selecting for first is the month, with this being the month.
We can continue on with another set of criteria. Have it be the item, and this is
the specific item we're selecting and you can see 78 is the total of just May
Item2's. And that's the SUMIFS function. Number
24 - IFERROR function. The IFERROR function can be used to clean up some
bad data. For example, I have a formula here that calculates the per item amount
for the quantity and the total. If I copy this down I get a divided by zero error
because the quantity on this line is zero. Well, the IFERROR function can be
used to clean this up. All you have to do is come in here, add IFERROR in front of
your formula, and if that value is an error then what do you want to do? Let's
just put in zero. Now when I copy that down it puts a zero in there but still
calculates the other locations correctly. And that's a quick fix with the IFERROR
function. Number 25 - Filled Maps. Filled Maps are just like any other chart but
way cooler. Take a set of data, highlight it, make sure you have location specific
information in here, which can be a state, a city, a zipcode, GPS coordinates, or any
other location related data elements . Go to insert and choose Maps. Select this
Filled Map and your data elements will be placed on a map. In this case the
United States. You can also add different chart elements like Data Labels and you
can change the chart to different types of styles. It's a very cool 2016 feature.
And that conclude this video of the top 25 Excel 2016
tips and tricks. Don't forget to check out the other tips and tricks videos for
Outlook, Skype for Business, Word, PowerPoint, and more coming in the future. Thanks for watching. Hey, if you want to see more videos like this one, please
subscribe and if you've enjoyed this video be sure to click the thumbs-up and
leave a comment. I really do appreciate your support!
25 minutes? Ain't nobody got time for that, can I get a TL;DR? :)
bruh, i couldn't watch it after 1 min, too long,