There are two kinds of Microsoft Excel users in the world: Those who make neat little tables, and those who amaze their colleagues with sophisticated charts, data analysis, and seemingly magical formula and macro tricks. You, obviously, are one of the latter—or are you? Check our list of 11 essential Excel skills to prove it—or discreetly pick up any you might have missed.
Vlookup
Vlookup is the power tool every Excel user should know. It helps you herd data that's scattered across different sheets and workbooks and bring those sheets into a central location to create reports and summaries.
Say you work with products in a retail store. Each product typically has a unique inventory number. You can use that as your reference point for Vlookups. The Vlookup formula matches that ID to the corresponding ID in another sheet, so you can pull information like an item description, price, inventory levels, and other data points into your current workbook.
Summon the Vlookup formula in the formula menu and enter the cell that contains your reference number. Then enter the range of cells in the sheet or workbook from which you need to pull data, the column number for the data point you’re looking for, and either “True” (if you want the closest reference match) or “False” (if you require an exact match).
Creating charts
To create a chart, enter data into Excel with column headers, then select Insert > Chart > Chart Type. Excel 2013 even includes a Recommended Charts section with layouts based on the type of data you’re working with. Once the generic version of that chart is created, go to the Chart Tools menus to customize it. Don't be afraid to play around in here—there are a surprising number of options.
IF formulas
IF and IFERROR are the two most useful IF formulas in Excel. The IF formula lets you use conditional formulas that calculate one way when a certain thing is true, and another way when false. For example, you can identify students who scored 80 points or higher by having the cell report “Pass” if the score in column C is above 80, and “Fail” if it’s 79 or below.
IFERROR is a variant of the IF Formula. It lets you return a certain value (or a blank value) if the formula you’re trying to use returns an error. If you’re doing a Vlookup to another sheet or table, for example, the IFERROR formula can render the field blank if the reference is not found.
PivotTables
PivotTables are essentially summary tables that let you count, average, sum, and perform other calculations according to the reference points you enter. Excel 2013 addedRecommended PivotTables, making it even easier to create a table that displays the data you need.
To create a PivotTable manually, ensure your data is titled appropriately, then go to Insert> PivotTable and select your data range. The top half of the right-hand-side bar that appears has all your available fields, and the bottom half is the area you use to generate the table.
For example, to count the number of passes and fails, put your Pass/Fail column into theRow Labels tab, then again into the Values section of your PivotTable. It will usually default to the correct summary type (count, in this case), but you can choose among many other functions in the Values dropdown box. You can also create subtables that summarize data by category—for example, Pass/Fail numbers by gender.
Flash Fill
Easily the best new feature in Excel 2013, Flash Fill solves one of the most frustrating problems of Excel: pulling needed pieces of information from a concatenated cell. When you’re working in a column with names in “Last, First” format, for example, you historically had to either type everything out manually or create an often-complicated workaround.
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