Excel is a powerful business tool that can save you both time and money, but only if you know how to use it effectively. If you know where to get custom-built spreadsheets and how to use some of the shortcuts built into Excel, it becomes one of the most powerful productivity tools in your arsenal.
Get custom-made spreadsheets
Lots of people are familiar with Excel and can build a basic spreadsheet, but far fewer are able to really make it work to its full potential. Fortunately, Luz VC offers you the perfect way to get exactly the spreadsheet you need.
Rather than stick with inefficient spreadsheets that aren’t quite meeting your needs, get the help of Excel professionals, as they offer a variety of popular ready-made spreadsheets that many businesses find useful. You can order custom sheets tailored for your specific concerns.
Learn how to find duplicates
When you start working with enormous amounts of data on a spreadsheet, it can be frustratingly difficult to find duplicate information. You might need to cull your customer email address list or make sure you haven’t set up the same tasks multiple times but have put off doing so because you can’t afford the time.
Fortunately, Excel has a great way for you to quickly find and remove duplicates on any spreadsheet, no matter how large. The most efficient way to do so is the following:
- Select the range to check
- Click “Conditional Formatting” under the Home tab
- Click “Highlight Cells Rules” and then choose “Duplicate Values”
- Select the formatting style you want to highlight the duplicates and then press “OK”
Use automation to your advantage
One way that Excel saves you time and money is by automating a lot of the repetitive tasks you would otherwise need a human to do. If you have a large volume of reports to generate or summaries to make, Excel macros will do the heavy lifting for you.
Once you have identified the types of tasks you would like to have automated, you can ask your custom-spreadsheet designer to build these in using the Developer tab. Here are just a few tasks Excel can automate for you:
- Convert coordinate lists into geometry to visualize on a map
- Automatically merge other databases with your spreadsheets, from demographic databases, CAD drawings, or web services
- Generate high volumes of statistics sheets with summary reports
- Reconcile two databases and flag inconsistencies
- Test strategies against historical data
Know how to see what you want to see
If you have a multi-page Excel sheet to work with, your people could be wasting valuable time trying to find what they want to see and then compare it to something else farther down. Fortunately, there is a simple way to fix this problem.
Choose the rows or columns you want to keep track of and then click on the View Tab. The drop down menu will bring up an option to “Freeze Panes.” Frozen panes will stay at the top of your sheet no matter how far down you scroll.
Master the use of keyboard shortcuts
Keyboard shortcuts let you make the fastest use of Excel. Mastering at least some of these will really make your life easier, and you should make sure your key people know how to use them, too.
The ones to focus on are the shortcuts that make it easier to navigate, enter data, and select items to view. Note that some shortcuts are different depending on whether you’re using a Mac or a PC. Either way, mastering shortcuts is a great way to save time and effort.
Excel is a powerful tool that can make an enormous difference to your company’s efficiency and your ability to leverage data to make the most of it. Get the custom spreadsheets you need to benefit your business and then take some time to learn how to use them to best advantage.
