Excel Tips All College Students Should Know

Excel Tips All College Students Should Know Image via Udemy Excel seems like a foreign language to those who are unfamiliar with spreadsheets and numbers. As a finance major, I took for granted my opportunity to learn Excel within my classes. Data Journalism is one of the classes required for my professional writing minor, and we are learning basic Excel, which I learned during my freshman year of college. I wanted to share some tips and useful functions that I have learned over the years to help students who are not part of the business schools become more familiar with using databases and visualizing data. Excel can even be used for personal budgeting or habit tracking! Here are some of the things I feel are important for students to know. 1. Creating Charts Some people love visuals, and Excel provides tools that make it so much easier to look at all your information. Charts are useful for anything from budgeting your money to tracking your exercise progress. Here is a step-by-step guide to creating Excel charts that will make your life so much easier. 2.  Sorting and Filtering Data Excel allows you to easily change the order of your data to one that makes sense. You have the option to filter alphabetically from A to Z or backward, or a custom sort of whatever field you would like. Filtering makes it easy to select options with a certain feature that you are looking for. Here is a video that demonstrates sorting and filtering. 3. Important Formulas Excel has so many different formulas, but the most simple and time-saving ones are as follows: •SUM: Automatically adds numbers together •IF: Allows you to manipulate results (For example, in words this would be: Make this cell say yes if the content of the cell 5) •AVERAGE, MEDIAN, MODE, MIN, MAX: Yup, Excel does all of this for you! •DATE and TIME: Literally inserts the day and time into your worksheet The best part about the formulas is if you click the little fx button next to the typing bar, Excel opens a dialog box that gives step by step directions on how to complete it! 4.  Quick Tips   Here are some of my best tips for navigating through Excel as quickly as possible! •Use the fx button to complete formulas you are unfamiliar with. •If the cell you are working with becomes too small for the text you are typing in it, double click the line next to the letter of the column, and it will expand the cell to the size of your text. •To quickly add up a set of numbers, use the autosum button on the formulas tab it is a sigma! •If you want to copy the contents of a cell to the rest of the column or row, click on the cell, and move your cursor to the bottom right corner of the cell. When the white cross turns black, you can drag it either horizontally or vertically to copy the contents of the cell to additional places. •Create a Macro to repeat tasks easily when there are several steps. Learn how here. Excel is a super useful tool for organizing and visualizing data, and I hope these tips help you use the software more quickly and efficiently!