Tuesday, January 19, 2016
Seven Useful Microsoft Excel Features You May Not Be Using
lifehacker.com: Microsoft Excel is packed with useful data management features that don’t see a lot of use, like pivot tables, index and match, and conditional formatting. If you’re just using excel to sum and chart columns, this graphic can show you some other tools to help you become the spreadsheet ninja you always wanted to be.
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4 comments:
After just having the first day of Excel in PTM, I though this article would be a useful read. Most of the tips however, I doubt I will ever use. Excel is a really useful tool, which I have a bit of experience with from high school and now more with this class. However, if I am not just using if for sorting names, or adding numbers, I find that it is also one of the most annoying tools. Rarely will their be a time that I don't spend long amounts of time formatting things that should be easy, or just doing the math myself on a calculator. I really do like using excel, and it's probably user error more than anything, but I always have a tough time making excel do what I want, and then looking the way I want. This article has more functions that excel can do, but knowing myself I probably won't use them.
It is amazing how many features Excel has. I have very little experience with Excel, so the only thing out of this I’d heard of before was conditional formatting. The forecasting and flash fill seem like the coolest features to me. I think Excel is a program that most people feel like they are proficient in even if they really don’t know it very well. I know that if someone asked me if I could use Excel, I’d say yes, even though I can’t use the vast majority of the features, and what I can do is rarely the most efficient way to do it. Though this article obviously isn’t a comprehensive tutorial is Excel, it really does show me how little I know. I will probably end up using at least one of these features at some point, as well as countless others that I either learned about in class the other day, or that I haven’t even heard of yet.
It’s crazy to think that just last week I read an article that said “excel is broken”. And now I find myself reading an article that gives you tips on how to expand your knowledge with the program. I would say half of these tips would be of no use to me in a theater application the other half of them would probably proved to be very useful when doing spreadsheets for various applications in the theater world. I’m going to have to say that flash fill seems like the one that I would be using the most. It’s a real bummer because there’re so many functions within EXCEL that could be so useful to me but it would be impossible to learn purely because of the amount of functions that EXCEL offers. Don’t get me wrong I’m sure there is someone that uses every single one of these functions in their job but for your basic EXCEL user like me I find myself drowning in useless formulas. I rely on articles like these to provide me with the most important functions EXCEL offers.
I liked this article as a whole, especially because it fits into the PTM class we had earlier this week on excel. I will definitely save this article for future reference, as I know that excel will play an important role in this upcoming semester, and upcoming career in the theatre.I thought that the setup of the article was very nice, easy, and engaging to read. However, I think that it could have spent more time in both explaining what the tools they’re telling you about actually do, as well as more on how to find them. They mostly used 2013 or 2016 versions of excel, but as many commenters have noted, many offices still run on the 2010 version of the program. Technology changes quickly, and not everyone has the opportunity to have the latest product. As both Annie and Julian have said, many of the tips and tricks in the article seem cool, in theatre, I will most likely only use a few of them.
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