Top 5 Functions in MS Excel to Simplify Your Data Analysis

There are very, very few people who could say they’ve absolutely mastered every intricate little detail about Microsoft Excel. It is the world’s most popular spreadsheet application and has been the industry standard for almost 35 years.

Microsoft Excel’s spreadsheet dominance is yet to be fully challenged by its competitors:

• Corel’s Quattro Pro (which is still available as part of WordPerfect Office)
• LibreOffice’s open-source tools
• Google Sheets (the spreadsheet part of Google Drive).

Excel is more than a well-known brand: it is a formidable tool. It performs nearly all of the functions one may wish for in a spreadsheet.

Almost every Excel user has one thing in common: a lack of knowledge. There are so many ways to slice and dice data, to give it a new look, and to do so much more that it’s hard to list them all.

However, it’s simple to learn some of the most interesting and intricate strategies that will simplify your time using the application and make you look like a high-tech spreadsheet genius.

Here are a few functions of Excel which will help you at analyzing data better.

Advantages of MS Excel

Not only will an advanced online Excel course provide companies with more qualified personnel, but it will also equip employees with tools that will enable them to work more efficiently in their existing roles and rise to higher-level ones.

1. Enhancing Your Productivity and Efficiency

Excel helps you increase productivity and efficiency when working with huge volumes of data and calculations. When you have a more advanced understanding of Excel, you will be able to use its more sophisticated capabilities, which will enable you to finish jobs and analyse data more rapidly. Additionally, it enables you to keep team members informed of changes to data, which can help streamline the workflow process.

Even better, mastering advanced Excel will enable you to improve the efficiency of your calculations. Repeated calculations take time, much more so when you have to double-check your work.

Excel’s advanced capabilities enable you to do more complex computations. Once you’ve entered your formula and programmed your set command, the application will perform the calculations for you, freeing up your time for other tasks and guaranteeing that you always obtain correct results.

2. Making Yourself a More Valuable Employee

Being a valuable employee not only increases job stability but also creates prospects for promotion. The only way to increase your value to the firm is to improve your efficiency, education, and skill in your job tasks.

That is what advanced Excel courses can deliver. Employees should always seek ways to expand their value in order to prevent being replaced by newer workers with a more sophisticated skill set.

It is critical to continue learning and mastering new abilities in order to stay on top of your game and position yourself for increased security and advancement.

3. Making You More Effective at Data Organization

Spreadsheets are a frequently used tool for collecting and organizing data. Additionally, Excel is a spreadsheet software in its simplest form.

It enables you to meticulously arrange all of your data while also allowing you to sort the data in whatever way you like.

Raw data can be intimidating and difficult to analyze. With Excel’s advanced capabilities, you’ll be able to better organize your data, do necessary computations, and sort the data so that it can be evaluated suitably and transferred to graphs or charts for easier viewing.

4. It May Simplify Your Job

The more competent at Excel you get, the more quickly you will be able to traverse the system.

Microsoft Excel includes various keyboard shortcuts that can help you work faster and even master more advanced Excel tactics that are applicable across the full Microsoft Office product suite.

Additionally, you will be able to use the data in your Excel sheet across a range of tools, decreasing the need for data re-entry and streamlining your workflow.

The easier your job is to perform and the more equipped you are to do it, the more likely you are to love it. Indeed, research indicates that cheerful workers are 20% more productive than their miserable colleagues. The simpler your work is, the happier and more productive you will be as an employee.

5. It Increases Productivity and Efficiency

Yes, as noted previously, advanced training in Microsoft Excel can increase employee efficiency and productivity, which translates into increased efficiency and productivity for the organization.

The more efficiently your employees work, the faster tasks and projects will be completed, allowing you to deliver greater service to your customers and clients and produce more work in a shorter period of time.

Even if the benefits of advanced Excel training save your employee a half-hour of time each week, when multiplied by the whole number of employees in your department or organization, this can add up to a huge amount of additional staff hours per week.

6. Top Functions for Simplifying Data Analysis Using MS Excel

If you’ve ever used Excel, you’ve almost certainly felt the agony of using the improper formula to analyze a data set.

Maybe you have worked on it for hours before abandoning it because the data output was inaccurate or the function was very complicated, and manually counting the data looked simpler. If that sounds familiar, then here is the top list of functions to simplify your Data Analysis in Excel is for you.

Excel contains hundreds of functions, and it can be overwhelming to match the appropriate formula to the appropriate type of data analysis. The most useful functions do not need to be difficult to utilize.

1. CONCATENATE

=CONCATENATE is one of the simplest to learn yet amongst the most powerful data analysis formulas. Combine text, numbers, dates, and more from many cells into one. This is a fantastic function for creating:

• API endpoints
• SKUs for products
• Java queries.

=CONCATENATE (SELECT CELLS YOU WANT TO COMBINE)

2. LEN

=LEN returns the number of characters contained in a given cell. As in the preceding example, you can identify two distinct types of product Stock Keeping Units (SKUs) by using the =LEN formula to determine the number of characters in the cell.

LEN is particularly beneficial when attempting to distinguish between several Unique Identifiers (UIDs), which are frequently lengthy and out of order.

=LEN (SELECT CELL)

3. COUNTA

=COUNTA determines whether or not a cell is empty. Daily, a data analyst will come across incomplete data sets. COUNTA enables you to examine any gaps in the collection without reorganizing it.

4. SUMIFS

=SUMIFS is a formula that every data analyst should be familiar with.

While =SUM is the traditional way, what if you need to sum data based on various criteria? SUMIFS helps you do that. SUMIFS is used in the example below to determine the contribution of each product to top-line revenue.

5. VLOOKUP

VLOOKUP is a widely used and well-known data analysis function. As an Excel user, you will almost certainly need to “marry” data at some point.

For instance, accounts receivable may be aware of the cost of each product, but the shipping department can only offer the number of units dispatched. That is an ideal application of VLOOKUP.

The graphic below illustrates how we may use reference data (A2) in conjunction with the price table to have Excel search for matching criteria in the first column and return an adjacent value.

Conclusion

We are all aware that excel is a critical piece of software in today’s world. Every employer wants his employees to be familiar with it in order for them to perform well in the workplace.

Every working professional must learn Excel in order to maintain his or her position in the organization, and new hires must learn it in order to gain employment.

For the vast majority of office positions, including those of office managers, personal assistants, and secretaries, a working grasp of Excel is necessary.

If you understand how to use Excel, you are job-ready, and no one can stop you from growing and developing.