Microsoft Excel is the most useful and most used tool in companies, also excellent for making calculations and organizing personal, family or independent professional activities accounts. Knowing all the Excel functions may require reading a certainly not short manual that few have the time and desire to study. In blogs like this, we barely scratch the surface of this immense program of the Microsoft Office suite trying to highlight its most special functions, the most useful ones that all users should know and be able to use.
In a nutshell, but reporting the references for the respective specific complete guides in Italian, we see here at least 6 very useful functions of Excel (especially on Excel 2010 and 2013, also 2007) for the processing of data and tables and for their visualization in graphic form .
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1) Sparkline Charts
Sparklines have been present since the Excel 2010 version and are used to represent trend views of data written in a row.
Practically it is a miniaturized graph that is inserted in a single Excel cell, without taking up space on the sheet, to have a summary at a glance of the data present on a row.
To create sparkline charts, select the range of cells, click on the Insert menu and choose the type of chart from Lines, Histogram or Positives / negatives.
On the official Office website, the detailed guide on how to use Sparkline charts.
2) Conditional formatting
Conditional formatting is a fairly well-known feature of Excel, used to present, color or change the formatting of individual cells automatically based on certain conditions.
For example, it becomes useful to create a heat map to see cells with low numbers colored blue and higher numbers colored red.
To create the heat map with conditional formatting, select the data and, from the Home menu at the top, the Styles, click the Conditional Formatting button choosing the type of color scale and the chromatic scale.
You can also put icons and arrows next to each cell to find out if the value is rising or falling.
Conditions are rules that can be specified using classic Excel functions.
Also for this function, read the Office guide to know both sides
3) MIN MAX LARGE SMALL functions
The Minimum MIN and Maximum MAX functions in Excel extract the maximum and minimum values of the selected data.
However, if you want to find not only the first largest but also the second, third and nth, there are the LARGE AND SMALL functions, to find the nth largest or smallest value respectively among the selected data.
For more information on Excel functions, you can read the Office help.
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4) Remove duplicates
In a table with a lot of data inside (like an address book) it is easy that there are also duplicates to be deleted.
Excel works well to remove duplicates of a list, from Excel 2007 and also in Excel 2010 and 2013 you can use the special function, from the Data menu.
The Office guide gives us all the details.
5) Data filters on pivot tables
Pivot tables are among the Excel operations that everyone must know how to do.
Visual filters on pivot tables allow you to view the subset of data as a linked graph or as raw data.
For example, you can view the sales trend of the various products, with an interactive graph that changes according to the filter that is applied on the data.
Data filters are a really useful and customizable feature so, in order to know how to use it, it is worth taking a look at the official guide that explains all the details at best.
6) VLOOKUP or VSLOOKUP function
VLOOKUP is one of the most useful functions of Excel to process data in database lists (with unique identifying numbers) in order to search for a particular item in a column and see the data searched for in a different column in the same row as that item.
For example, in a list of products, for an article number you can know the price, the description etc.
In practice it is a function that automates the reading of certain data in an Excel database.
CERCA.VERT is a function used mainly in the commercial sector, which hopefully allows you to save a lot of time.
The guide in Italian on CERCA.VERT is on the Office website.
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