Tricks & Tips for Spreadsheets: Must-Have Excel Skills for Experts

Microsoft Excel is more than a spreadsheet. It’s a powerful tool for both analyzing and manipulating data. That’s why experts who have acquired top Excel skills are highly coveted by employers in any industry. Some are so good at it, that they replace entire transportation and logistics management software with Excel. So, what are the advanced skills you should have?

If you’re wondering how to get better at Excel, this post is tailored for you. We will cover crucial advanced skills that help you not just enter data and use formulas in a spreadsheet, but visualize and modify it in several ways to make out important insights at a glance.

Excel skills you must know:

Before you go on to learn complicated concepts, it’s important to have basic Excel skills in your arsenal. Otherwise, those advanced excel tricks and tips would would confuse you more instead of sparking your curiosity and inspiring you to use them in your projects. Make sure that you have basic Excel skills like:

• Using formulas in rows and columns
• Conditional formatting that lets you highlight skills when they meet your predetermined conditions
• Keyboard shortcuts that help you stay productive and efficient, etc.

With that out of the way, let’s learn how you can improve Excel skills to an advanced level.

Quick Tip: If you’re looking for advanced PowerPoint presentation tips, click on this link.

Advanced Excel skills you need to learn:

1. INDEX/MATCH

Excel gurus in their comfort zone have a hard time looking beyond VLOOKUP. However, INDEX/MATCH is a much better alternative and a worthy addition to your arsenal. This formula allows you to find the exact data point you need in a large data set. Moreover, unlike VLOOKUP, it is highly flexible as it can search for data in any direction and doesn’t break down with multiple criteria. You aren’t an expert if you don’t have this advanced Excel skill in your armory.

2. Filters

Intermediary Excel experts know about sorting data. This function allows you to sort data depending on several criteria. However, sorting may undo some important work as it reorders the positions of different cells. That’s where the filter comes out as the savior. You can set multiple filtering parameters and highlight the data set you need. Filtering counts among indispensable Excel tricks and tips since it increases the efficiency of your workflow.

3. Pivot tables

Pivot tables are amazing data analysis tools in Excel. They allow you to group, analyze, and even summarize exceptionally large data sets. With pivot tables sales managers can switch seamlessly between analyzing sales by:

• A particular product SKU (stock-keeping unit)
• Region, or
• Performance of different salespeople under the manager.

These tables also allow you to identify trends in your datasets.

4. IFERROR

Experts make mistakes! Experts have those days! Fortunately, IFERROR stands as a safety net for those days. It acts as a safety net that allows you to dodge an unending array of error messages when something goes wrong. Instead of drawing under error messages, you can choose to display custom messages during those situations. As you keep using IFERROR, your formulas get refined and more robust over time.  

5. Conditional Formatting

Conditional formatting is one of the powerful Excel skills for professionals that enables you to change the appearance of the cells based on your specific criteria. This acts as a useful tool to highlight important data so that you don’t waste much time to search what you’re looking for! You can also apply data bars and color scales for quickly comparing data, and sorting them out based on their values!

6. Charts and Graphs

Creating charts and graphs to present data using Vlookup is another skill that you must hone to enhance your Excel skills. Owing to the emphasis that companies are giving on data structuring nowadays, having this skill can allow you to arrange and collaborate data easily, without sticking to the monotonous tabular format, thereby enhancing your presentation skills as well.

7. Data Validation

This is yet another tool that helps you restrict the type of data that can be entered into a cell. For instance, data validation enables you to specify a minimum and maximum value for a cell, which makes sure that only the numbers falling between that specified range will appear in a cell(s). This is a useful feature for fields like quantity, age, or price.

When you master these advanced Excel skills, you can unlock more opportunities and move your career in a better direction. You’ll appreciate the possibilities that these skills provide and start seeing spreadsheets as more than mere data entry tools. Did we miss out on something on how to get better at Excel? Let us know in the comments.