Your Excel Survival Kit pdf

You have just been promoted into a job that requires more Excel skills than ever. You are floundering, drowning in a sea of spreadsheets. This book walks you through in an easy accessible way—vlookups, pivot tables, Power Query, and Power Pivot. The Excel Survival Kit is small enough to slip into your purse. Chapter 1, “Back to Basics: What Do You Know Already?”: This chapter provides a quick intro to the absolute essentials you need to know to grapple with Excel. It shows you how to tackle common tasks like printing, sorting and filtering, and fixing cells. It is set up as a series of numbered steps that you can quickly work through to learn or get reacquainted with Excel basics. Note This book comes with files you can practice on. Find these files at www.mrexcel.com/survivalfiles.html. Chapter 2, “Getting Your Data Together: Catching Your File”: This chapter is about getting your data together and, more importantly, assembling your data in a way that makes doing all the other clever stuff with Excel relatively straightforward. This is the secret sauce. This chapter shows you how to set up a list so that your data is entered accurately and completely. It shows you how to set up your data so that you can easily get whatever you need out of it later on. It shows you how to set up a simple list and how to create a list for your recurring data. It’s the piece that’s often omitted in many Excel books. You get it here. Chapter 3, “Further Cleaning, Slicing, and Dicing”: Yes, at this point you’ve already got your data into good shape, but you may still need to do further clean-up. This chapter shows you how to remove/complete blank rows, columns, and cells. You will learn some clever quick techniques to clean, combine, and amend existing data. You will also see examples of using formulas to extract specific pieces of data from a data set. You will learn how to identify and remove duplicates and to use conditional formatting to quickly identify the appropriate entries. Chapter 4, “The Vlookup() Function: An Excel Essential”: One of the key tasks in Excel is pulling in and assembling matching data from different sources. To do this, you need to know Excel’s Vlookup() function. This entire chapter focuses on this function, including how to use it and also its pitfalls and idiosyncrasies so that you know how to handle this function with speed and care. You will learn how to use it to compare lists and identify missing data (in minutes rather than hours). Chapter 5, “Creating Pivot Tables”: When you need to summarize and present all the data you have so lovingly gathered, cleaned, and assembled, you need to use a pivot table. You can use a pivot table to summarize thousands of rows of data in minutes. A learner once described it to me beautifully as “shrinking your data,” and that’s what a pivot table allows you to do. You can quickly and easily view your data by months or by various headings. If your boss wants to get a different view of some data and if you have a pivot table, you can deliver the goods in minutes. Moving from manual data organization using filters and sorting to using pivot tables is like moving from walking to driving. Chapter 6, “Using Power Query to Quickly Clean Up Data”: Before this point in the book, you have done a lot of data clean-up manually. In this chapter you learn how to use Power Query to do that work in minutes and, even more amazingly, how to store the steps you take so that all you have to do when you get next month’s data is change the data source. Power Query is a game changer, but it’s still not very well known beyond the Excel world, so if you learn to use it, you have the inside track. I have to say that every time I use Power Query to clean up data, I feel like a magician—and I want you to feel like that, too. Chapter 7, “Beyond the Pivot Table: Power Pivot”: If using pivot tables is like driving a car, using Power Pivot is like travelling by jet. Power Pivot allows you to assemble lots of different data sets together without using Vlookup()s and to generate pivot tables with formulas (measures) that allow you to look at your data in all sorts of new ways. Power Pivot is the future of pivot tables, and you’ll get a taste of it here