Excel – Page 3 – IT Connect

Capturing Screenshots in Office

To follow along with last week’s post we wanted to give you a few tips on using screenshots in the Microsoft Suite.

From the Insert tab (available in all of the Office products), select the Screenshot icon. Microsoft gives you two options you can use to insert an image. Click on the drop down arrow and either select Available Window, which gives you the option to insert another window into your document like in the example below:

Or, you can insert a Screen Clipping, which allows you to select the specific item you want to insert. First, click on the window you want to grab the screenshot from to make the window active. Next, go back to the Office product you want to insert the screenshot into. Select the Screenshot icon and select Screen Clipping, the window that you were previously on will gray out.

The cursor will change to a cross +. Left click and select the area you want to insert. Here, I selected just the clip I wanted.

That’s our quick tip of the day. Happy screen clipping!

What’s behind the Excel Design tab? 5 tips worth knowing.

If you’ve been working with Excel for a while, my guess is that you are probably somewhat familiar with the basics of converting your data into a table. However, you may not be aware of some of the features behind the Design tab. The Design tab will display anytime you click in a table.

Here are 5 handy tips worth knowing. I will review them from right to left.

When you click on the drop down in the Table styles options you’ll see an assortment of Table Styles available to suit your preferences.
If there is a table style you like and you want to add additional customization you can do so by selecting a feature in the Table Style Options section. I often choose to have items displayed with banded rows (every other row shaded), but sometimes it might be easier on the eye to have banded columns.
Selecting the Total Row not only adds a total line to your table, but it also has built in functions that you can toggle to further analyze specific data.
Did you know you could add a slicer to filter through data? Select Slicer, next select what column you want to filter. In my example, I wanted to view specific types of charges, so I chose the account columns to filter.

Next, select the item you want to filter and the results will be displayed.

5. Selecting the Remove Duplicates button will allow you to delete duplicate values. You’ll simply need to tell Excel what column you want the duplicates to be removed from. Oh and by the way, if you remove duplicates from the wrong column, don’t forget the handy Ctrl+Z function to undo your last action!

To learn more Excel tips, check out one of my Basic Formula workshops or Rachel Mulry’s Advanced Excel training.

smu.edu/BusinessFinance/OIT/Training

Pivot Tables in Excel 2013

By: Rajat Shetty

Excel Pivot tables help summarize your data. They also allow you to avoid using complex formulas like Vlookup, SumIF, etc. to create a table. It can take a little while for a newbie to get the hang of Pivot tables. However, the 2013 Excel updates make creating Pivot tables even simpler.

A few years back, we had to follow these steps to create a simple pivot table:

Select the data range
Insert pivot table from the Insert tab
Go to the new worksheet to check if all the fields are appearing or not

4. Manually drag and drop the required fields according to our requirements to calculate-Sum, average, percentage, etc.

With the new Microsoft Excel-2013, you are just one click away from creating a basic pivot table. The best part is you do not have to drag and drop anything into the field list. As seen to the right, you can pull the exact information you need from a complex spreadsheet without having to go through the above mentioned steps for Excel-2010.

How do you create Pivot tables in 2013?

Instead of inserting a Pivot table from the Insert tab, just click on the “Recommended Pivot Tables” option on the Insert tab.

As you can see in the above image, Excel automatically suggests three or four options for your data range. All you have to do is make sure that your cursor is in one of the data entries on the main sheet before you click on “Recommended Pivot Tables”.

When you select one of the recommended Pivot tables, it automatically adjusts the fields without the user having to drag and drop in the Pivot table field list. Once the Pivot table is created you can customize the fields according to your requirements.

In summary, we use the following steps to create a Pivot table using Excel-2013:

1. Organize and arrange data in columns
2. Make sure each column has a heading
3. Click on Insert and select the “Recommended Pivot Charts” option
4. Choose the desired Pivot table
5. Sit back and relax

Here’s looking forward to future updates from Microsoft Office. Maybe next time Excel will be even more intuitive.