Filtering and Analyzing Information in Excel

Microsoft Excel. Do those two words make you tremble? Do they remind you of hours wasted sifting via thousands and thousands of rows of data? Properly, if they do, they shouldn’t. You can use a couple of very simple tricks to analyze data more rapidly than ever ahead of.

I’m going to assume you are an intermediate Excel user, and are comfy with fundamental Excel formulas, such as the SUM function. You may possibly have heard of pivot tables, but are not confident with creating them yourself. In other words, you use Excel to produce tables with a view to developing standard reports.

When tracking your corporations performance, it is valuable to create subtotals of sales, of stock, by division, by date…the list is virtually endless. Basically, you want a reporting dashboard whereby you can select any element of your enterprise and view its current efficiency.

You are possibly aware that you can auto-filter tables in Microsoft Excel. This suggests that your table with 20 columns and 1000 rows can be sorted and filtered by any column e.g. date. That way, you can swiftly view e.g. all your orders for March. So far, this must sound familiar. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if the act of filtering your table also updated your dashboard?

The fantastic news is that they can, and that you never want to be an Excel specialist to reach this. Let’s say you have a list of amounts in Column B. You might have calculated the total utilizing the formula “=SUM(B:B)”. When excel course Dubai filter by date, the total amount does not alter. This is because the other orders still exist, you just cannot see them at the present time.

What you want is an alternative to the SUM function that only counts the visible rows. Fortunately, 1 exists, and it is the SUBTOTAL function. The SUBTOTAL function can sum information, it can typical information, it can count data, it can do fairly significantly anything to data. The difference amongst the SUBTOTAL function and any other Excel function is that it only consists of the displayed data in its calculations.

The SUBTOTAL function will provide subtotals for the information displayed in filtered tables. It can help you produce very simple, flexible, numeric reporting dashboards. However it is not considerably excellent if you wish to plot your information on charts. If you create a bar chart to track monthly functionality, it is not a great deal excellent if you are totalling January and February’s information in specifically the very same cell. It is therefore also valuable if you can subtotal each month’s information simultaneously.

This can be completed utilizing the SUMIF and COUNTIF functions. The SUMIF function lets you SUM all the data linked with a certain value e.g. all the sales in March. The COUNTIF function lets you COUNT how numerous items of information are associated with a specific worth e.g. how lots of orders have been received in April.

You may possibly consider these two functions are a bit limiting as the COUNTIF function will not let you count how a lot of orders of over $500 had been received in April e.g. you can only count based on a single criteria. This is in contrast to our filtered table exactly where it is completely doable to show only orders of more than $500 that have been received in April.