Advance Excel
Advanced Excel Skills
Now a days, many jobs require advanced Excel skills. Naturally, you are interested to know what are these Advanced Excel Skills? Based on my experience of training more than 10,000 students in various online & physical training programs, the following 9 areas form the core of advanced Excel skills.
Key Takeaways
· The Advanced Excel Formulas help us understand the inbuilt advanced formulas used for generating reports for concerns, companies, etc.
· In Excel, VLOOKUP is the most commonly used LOOKUP function. Another important lookup function is HLOOKUP and XLOOKUP. Therefore, V stands for vertical lookup in VLOOKUP, and H stands for horizontal lookup in HLOOKUP.
· In VLOOKUP, we cannot have a primary column on the right of the column for which we want to populate the value from another table.
· One can combine INDEX and MATCH to overcome the limitation of VLOOKUP.
· We can use the OR function instead of AND to satisfy one of the many conditions.
List Of Top 10 Advanced Excel Formulas & Functions
The Top 10 Advanced Excel Formulas & Functions we will consider in this article are as follows:
1. VLOOKUP Formula in Excel
2. INDEX Formula in Excel
3. MATCH Formula in Excel
4. IF AND Formula in Excel
5. IF OR Formula in Excel
6. SUMIF Formula in Excel
7. CONCATENATE Formula in Excel
8. LEFT, MID, and RIGHT Formula in Excel
9. OFFSET Formula in Excel
10. TRIM Formula in Excel
Using Excel Productively
It is not enough to know various features of Excel. An advanced user knows how to use Excel productively. This includes knowing important keyboard shortcuts, mouse shortcuts, work-arounds, Excel customizations & how to make everything looks slick.
Integrating Excel with other tools & Optimizing Excel
Advanced users of Excel know that when you combine the power of Excel with flexibility of other applications like MS Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, Access, SQL Server, Power BI or Web, you can achieve wonders.
They also know how to make Excel workbooks fast and bug-free.
Become Advanced Excel User
To become an Advanced user in Excel, you need to have good knowledge of all the above aspects & more. This is where our training programs come in handy. Thru igglearning.com, I have trained more than 10,000 people all over the world & made them advanced Excel users. You too can get this training and become advanced user of Excel
Advanced
Formulas
Formulas
make Excel smart. With out them, Excel is just a data keeping tool. But by
using formulas, you can crunch data, analyze it and get answers to most complex
questions. While anyone can use a simple SUM or IF formula, an advanced user of
it would be able to seamlessly write & combine formulas like SUMIFS,
SUMPRODUCT, INDEX, MATCH, LOOKUP formulas. Apart from knowing the formulas,
advanced Excel users know how to debug them, audit them and how to use which
formula for which occasion (and they also know few alternatives for any given
formula problem).
Data,
Power Query, Tables & Formatting
Advanced
Excel users know how to gather, structure & present their data so that it
looks impressive. Good understanding of Excel features like Power Query (Get
& Transform Data), Tables, cell styles, formatting options is necessary to
make awesome Excel workbooks.
Conditional
Formatting
Conditional
formatting is a powerful feature in Excel that is often underutilized. By using
conditional formatting, you can tell Excel to highlight portions of your data
that meet any given condition. For example: highlighting top 10 customers,
below average performing employees etc. While anyone can set up simple
conditional formatting rules, an advanced Excel user can do a lot more. They
can combine formulas with conditional formatting to highlight data that meets
almost any condition.
Advanced
Charting
There is
no use if all your analysis is buried in a massive spreadsheet. Advanced users
of Excel know that by using charts, we can communicate effectively and present
results in a stunning manner. The skills required for advanced charting are,
·
Knowing
how to pick right type of chart for any situation
·
Ability
to combaine various charts in to one
·
Use
features like in-cell charts & conditional formatting charts
·
Ability
to set up dynamic & interactive charts
·
Use
sparklines
Pivot Tables & Pivot Reporting
Pivot
tables & pivot reporting allows us to analyze massive amounts of data &
answer questions with just a few clicks. Advanced users of Excel are very
familiar with various features of Pivot tables & can use them really well.
Some of the advanced pivot table features are – relationships, multi-tale
pivots, grouping, slicers, measures (Power Pivot) & summary by different type
of metrics.
VBA & Macros
Excel’s
own language – VBA, allows us to give instructions to Excel to get things done.
This is a simple, but extremely powerful way to extend Excel’s functionality.
Advanced users of Excel are familiar with VBA & can write macros to
automate their day to day work, thus saving countless hours of time &
money.
Data Tables, Simulations & Solver
Excel
has many powerful & advanced features packaged in to it.
· Data tables: help us model practical problems
& analyze massive amount of data for a solution.
· Solver: helps us model practical
problems & find a solution by iterating thru all possibilities. For
example, finding cheapest way to ship goods from one location to another.
· Simulations: We can simulate real world data
& situations in Excel using various random functions & statistical
methods.
· Forecasting: Create time-series forecasting to
analyze seasonal trends and predict future values.
· Trend analysis: We can use built in functions & charting features to understand trend& forecast values from available data.