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When you are working on MS Excel, have you ever asked yourself, “Is there a better way of doing this?” The answer is “YES”. Following are some of the MS Excel tools / functions that is going to save you a lot of time.

Basic List of Time-saving MS Excel  Tools

1. Pivot Table
2. Pivot Chart
3. Data Table

Pivot Table

This will com in handle when your supervisor / boss is:

• Over analytical
• always change their minds about the analysis

Then again, all bosses / supervisors are like that. So everyone working on Excel MUST know this tool.

Look at the youtube video for a quick introduction.

Proper tutorial: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuhQ9lSMmjg

More lively tutorial (recommended, it nicely summarizes this post): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bUMUGqx6kcU&feature=fvw

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It is especially good for analysis with more than 3 parameters. For example, a company’s sales analysis.

Fields available from the data:

1. Date
2. Customer name
3. Customer Type
4. Country
5. Region
6. Product sold
7. Price sold
8. Cost of Goods Sold (COGS)
9. Calculated (Gross Profit from sale)

You boss / supervisor came along, “Chris, can you pass me the country sales figures for this quarter?” You, being diligent, rushed off to produce the figures.

Next, your boss / supervisor said, “Good job Chris, how about the sales figures by country and month?” You will be thinking “OMG, that’s 3 – 4 times the work and data! What if he change his mind again!?”

This is where Pivot Table will be really HANDY!

Pivot Table can allow you to:

1. Create all the combinations that you boss / supervisor can think of! With a simple mouse drag.
   • He change his mind, you can go back to your Excel file and drag to rearrange the field, and you’ll have the result he wants!
2. Convert to Pivot Table for presentation, I’ll explain it in the later page.

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Pivot Table has its setbacks. The data will need to down to the smallest detail. That means each row will represent ONE invoice / sale. The columns will represent the fields (customers, country, sales amount, gross profit, etc.)

For small companies, you will need to:

1. Go to the accounting system and output the sales data by invoice entry in any of the following format to be used by Excel:
   • CSV (comma delimited), means values are separated by <,>
   • Text (tab delimited), means values are separated by <TAB>
2. Open the file you exported with Excel, do the necessary steps to import into Excel.

I won’t go into details because there are sites who explain the site. I’ll include the link shortly for your reference.

For big MNCs, you will need to:

1. If you have SAP or other Enterprise Resource Planning software you are in good situation. The data can be extracted by authorised staff. Go knock on the doors of the accounts / market analyst.
2. If you do not have such sophisticated software, you may need to ask for IT department’s help to perform a query (probably SQL) for you. You will need to specify the date range, region/country, else it’ll be too much data.
3. If the data points (rows) exceed 62,000 rows, be prepared to use MS Access. Avoid going there, it’s quite a hassle for people without programming background.
4. Maybe this funny video will give you some insights how to ask for help from the IT department: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Pr3L6H80dw&feature=channel
5. Good luck and pray that the IT doesn’t get pissed off by your requestS. Yes, you will approach him more than 2 times! If you don’t, you’re probably just very good with data. Congrats!

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