Excel if you don’t know is one of the most used budgeting and organizing spreadsheet softwares on the planet. Every business who is anyone has Microsoft Office 365 and has access to this usually when they get Word, Notes and Outlook.
This program is straight forward to use but has a lot of hidden features and shortcuts that don’t get shown to most users off the top. Today in this blog post we are going to go through a couple key features that not many people know about. If you do know about them great! Then you part of the percentage of people that have been watching Skycomp’s Solving Technology series and learning new skills for the workplace.
The biggest lifesaver is the Auto Sum button. This takes a selected column and gives you a sum of the data at the bottom in the next row. It does it instantly and quickly and its one button! It makes life so easy and speeds up workflow.
Another great tool is a shortcut that works with the Auto Sum button. Holding Control + Shift + and the right arrow key selects the entire row you had the cell selected. This works in many different directions of excel. For example, repeating the same pattern of keys but instead of the right arrow key, you hit the down arrow. This selects the entire row where you have the selected cell. Now get this, hitting the same combo of keys but one after another with the top left corner cell selected will highlight the entire sheet that has data in it! Formatting or re-formatting an entire sheet has never been so easy!
Another feature that get overlooked is the Table button under the insert menu. This allows you to create a table quickly and seamlessly with the random data that in each row and column. Simply by hitting that button, Excel takes all the information in the selected cells and asks if you have headers at the top row. If you have headers then great, but if not, Excel can create them for you.
Going even further with this tool, you can take that data now organized in a beautiful table and turn it into a graph. Choosing a graph can be difficult, but again the amazing software takes your data and gives you recommendations for what graph you should use. Select the graph and it creates a clipart image right in your sheet. You can copy that over to any other Microsoft compatible software and use it in your report.
The Auto Sum button gave me a total of the entire column. Took about three seconds, rather then having to scroll down and put in a formula. That saved my life!
~ Jaime, Finance and HR admin
Excel is doing wonderful things and making life as a data analyst or finance administrator. So many different jobs and applications you can use Excel for.
Lots of videos come out every single day showing a new or updated feature in Excel and many other features in the Office 365 suite. You can find many of these videos on YouTube or you can just go to skycomp.ca/learn for tons of content showing you several types of software and how to use it to its full potential.