Excel has long been a pillar of business. Excel is not the first or the only digital spreadsheet service – it was just the first one offered as a perk of purchasing a Microsoft Operating System! Free versions of digital spreadsheet management software, like the kind offered by LibreOffice, can be quality replacements too, although lacking some of the features Excel has.
Spreadsheets themselves are timeless, but an up-to-date Excel has more tools for managing them than ever before! It’s capable of complex math, charting, conditional highlighting, visualizing data in easier-to-understand terms, and more!
There’s an entire manual’s worth of utility within Excel, so this article is going to go over the very basics, so you can get started.
File Types
Excel can open many different file types, and create many too. It’s important to verify that you’re saving your file as it’s intended to be opened. Let’s navigate the Options menu: you can access this on initial startup in the bottom left of the screen, or by going to the ‘File’ tab after a blank document has already been opened.
Then, go to the segment labeled ‘Save’ – it will give you a handful of options, including where and how you want Auto-Save to activate, where your files will default to, and whether or not you want any exceptions to these rules. The second line in this setting menu will give you a handful of options on how you’d like Excel to default to save your files! This is nice to have if you have to export a lot of .csv or .odt files, as Excel will tend to default to .xls by default. (I say ‘tend to’ here because for reasons fully unknown to me, Excel briefly defaulted to saving files as .odt files for me, and I had to swap them out of that every time until I learned this can be changed! )
You can find a number of other settings in this menu, but as the basics guide, I don’t recommend you touch anything you’re not sure of – these are not the settings for the one document you’ve currently got open, they’re the defaults for every document, and if you break something manually here, you’re going to be dealing with it until you fix it manually! Language and Add-Ins are the exception, Language for obvious reasons and Add-Ins because you may want to add modules like Pivot Tables to your Excel, something beginners can do successfully.
Adding Formulas
Excel is capable of complex math that live-updates for you when fresh data is put in. The results can be sent to a square basically anywhere in the spreadsheet except on top of another piece of data, and then that square can be used in another formula, allowing you to do things like calculate both Gross Revenue and Gross Profit off of one set of data, without forcing you to recalculate. To continue the example, you can have Excel calculate a tax rate on your final profit, or subtract tax from each item individually and tally it at the end, depending on what you’re trying to do.
As a basic article, the easy way to get started with formulas is to start with a table of available ones, and find what you’re trying to do among them – so let’s say I need a total for five items of various prices. What I’ll do in this case is type an = sign in a box nearby my data, and then either type in “SUM(“ or search for it in the list that pops up (Excel will automatically suggest a handful of common ones and narrow down by letter as you type more. You may notice you don’t have to add the parentheses, but I always do because it makes dragging to select boxes easier!) After that, I click and drag over the five boxes I want summed up, and close the parentheses. Boom! Calculation prepared! Multiplying, subtracting, and dividing all follow similarly easy paths. If you need to do a range of boxes because your data is not continuous for whatever reason, you can do that by typing in the first range with a colon, adding a comma, and then typing in the next range, stopping when you’re out of data (for example, if I was trying to sum seven items and there was a break every three items, I could type =SUM(A1:A3, A5:A7, A8) and Excel would know what I was asking it to do).
Conditional Formatting
Conditional formatting is a tool that will selectively take action depending on the contents of the box, over a range you select. You can highlight just one row or column, or select a large area of a data table, or just one box that contains a formula that’s being updated.
The conditional formatting option can be found in the Home tab ribbon in the ‘Styles’ widget. Open it, and you’ll see a handful of options, all of which are pretty self-explanatory in what they’ll highlight for you, mostly numerical data values. You can also create new rules here, including ones like “highlight if this text row contains the word ‘Cheese’ in it”, or “Highlight all results above 7”. You can also stack rules, and tell it to highlight in different colors for different words or numbers across different rules!
Pivot Tables
Speaking of which, if you’re looking to make a quick and easy chart out of a lot of data, you can do that with formulas and the like and the charting function, or you can use Pivot Tables! Pivot Tables are an Add-In that must be downloaded from Excel, and there are a couple of spots you can do this – the Home tab has a widget for Add-Ins at the very end, and the File tab has one under the ‘Account’ section. Either way, if you need Pivot Tables, you can download it in one of these two spots.
Here is a tutorial from Microsoft: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-pivottable-to-analyze-worksheet-data-a9a84538-bfe9-40a9-a8e9-f99134456576
This covers the essentials! Pivot Tables sit a step above the most basic Excel charting, and offer up not only a better visualization of data, but also charting after the fact, so you’re not manually inputting numbers or linking individual boxes to charts as they’re made.
CoPilot
CoPilot is a branded Generative AI hosted by Microsoft, and it – like many Generative AIs on the market today – does not necessarily produce results in line with what you’d expect from Microsoft. As a Generative AI, it is prone to hallucinations, and in spite of much tweaking, it is not as excellent at math as the base Excel is. When you’re using AI tools, you should double check the results to be sure the AI is not giving you incorrect data or creating numbers, and this is VERY important when it comes to data measurement like what you’re probably doing with Excel. Of course, at that point, just Googling or searching the Help tab for what you’re trying to do is probably easier than reverse-engineering it from CoPilot to check it and make sure it all works.
Data Analysis is another tool that hasn’t worked consistently for me, but your mileage may vary as it doesn’t create formulas or numbers, it just tries to analyze them for you. The Pivot Tables and Conditional Formatting have given me better results with a little extra legwork, and work more consistently without freezing in my experience, but Microsoft is always updating and optimizing!
The important part is that you’re able to explain what each step of your process is doing – if there’s a point where you simply plug something in and it seems like the next number you get springs out of nowhere, you should stop and evaluate how you could possibly create those results manually! We’re headed towards a very real problem of AI management, where users are thinking their AI are capable of doing things they just aren’t. The problem is all in the application: when it’s something simple a person could catch, well – a person was probably already doing it instead of trying to get the AI to do it for them. When it’s much more complex, and handles much larger data tables, odds are the person was using the AI because the data is intimidating, or too much to handle, or something is keeping them from analyzing it by hand, and then they not only won’t check it because they have no reason to assume the AI is imperfect, they sometimes can’t, because they don’t know what they’re even looking at.
Tool literacy cannot be replaced by machines just yet, and the way things are going, it’s going to be years before the machines even get close to the average human error rate. Learn Excel, and you can be the person catching these mistakes before they turn into logistical or accounting nightmares!
