Some essential things you should learn about Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet application developed by Microsoft for Microsoft Windows and Mac OS. Ranging from basic to complex arithmetic operations, functions, offering graphing tools and pivot tables, Microsoft Excel allows users to organize, format and calculate data. In this way, Microsoft Excel has a great utility to help you do many things. It is therefore very much important to develop excel skills, as having a reasonable knowledge and skills of Microsoft Excel can help you propel both professionally and personally. If you think what essential things you need to learn and develop about Microsoft excel, this article might help you with that.

Entering basic Formulas: Microsoft Excel offers lots of formulas. You can not only get the desired results by learning how to enter formulas in the required rows and columns, but you can save your time and efforts to a great extent while getting even the complex arithmetic operations done with the help of Excel. The basic arithmetic operations that are commonly performed through Excel: Addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and percentage etc.

Making sub-totals or Grand totals: One of the most useful method of making total of the required number of rows or columns is to make use of sum totals formulas. For doing this, excel offers specific formulas that you can use in order to get the results. Not only that, it also helps you make the sub-totals which you can make use of it in case there is a need for you to do so.

Making various formats with values: Every so often, you may need to make different formats for the values entered in Excel Cells, such as, currency, percentage, fraction, accounting, time or various formats with dates. Excel helps you greatly in doing these things.

Creating tables: Whether it’s needed for your professional purpose or personal purpose, you may think it’s important to create tables for your data to be arranged accordingly. And you may also want the totals to be displayed under certain tables. This activity can also be performed with the help and assistance of Microsoft Excel.

Sorting Data: If there are times when you need to sort your data into ascending or descending order, or you want to apply the functionality of excel for the specific rows and columns, excel will let you do so effectively.

Filtering records in a table: Sometimes or often you would like to filter your data in a table, that is, hiding the data, except the rows you want to view. You can use the auto filtering feature of Microsoft Excel to perform this thing as per your requirement.

Locking or unlocking features: Microsoft Excel is of great help in letting you perform this activity. Whether it be your personal requirement or official, it might be important for you to lock the rows, columns or ranges, so that the data may not be view or manipulated by any other person except you. Whenever you need it, you can use this feature of locking and unlocking the different ranges of your data. Similarly, you can protect or hide your spreadsheets from being viewed by others by using passwords.

Fixing Scale for printing your worksheets: As and when needed, you can use this feature of Excel to fix the area to be printed. You may also adjust in a way that your data may be printed on one page. Not only this feature of Excel aids you greatly to fix the printing area according to your requirement, but it also allows you to print the page numbers, date, time and file name on the printouts.

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Written by:
K. A. Fareed (Fareed Siddiqui)
Writer, Trainer, Author, Blogger, Software Developer
BBA, MBA-Finance, MPhil-Financial Management, (MSc-Software Engineering)
(PhD-Management)
MA-English, MPhil-English
Post Graduate Diploma in Computer Applications and Programming
Certificate course in English language proficiency
Level 1 – Leadership and Management ILM – UK
Pursuing CMA-USA
Individual Member of Institute of Management Consultants of India