Five Hidden Tricks in Excel

The ease with which Excel comes has made it the world's premier spreadsheet application. However, while using it is easy, being a master in it requires extreme knowledge about functions, formulas, shortcuts, tricks, and everything that Excel can be used for.

Here are five hidden tricks in Excel to surprise you:

Five hidden tricks in Excel

• Flash Fill

Flash fill is used in Excel to identify a pattern and help in the extraction of data automatically. Often we have columns that have recurring patterns. To get data from such columns, either you can type them manually or use flash fill to extract data automatically.

Let us suppose we have a column containing the Name of employees in your organization and the date they joined as an employee, and you want to extract the joining date for each employee; now you can use Flash fill to extract the date.

• Days Difference

Calculating days difference is another useful hidden trick in Excel. Days difference is calculated for preparing meeting schedules, appointments, highlighting, and many other activities to estimate the number of days between two dates; the function is =DAYS(end_date,start_date). So, for example, the date difference between 31/01/2020 and 2/02/2020 is two days.

• Remove Duplicates

Working on data can be challenging, especially when you have a huge data set and want to remove duplicates. What can be an ideal solution? Looking at the figures and removing them one by one? No, this can not be used when the data is huge. For removing duplicates from data, we have a shortcut key in Excel: Select the column to delete the duplicates, go to DATA ribbon > data tools > delete duplicates. All you are left with is unique values.

• Create drop-down lists

We often come up with entries where one option is to be selected from a predefined option. That is the perfect situation to create drop-downs. Let us suppose you want to choose one among the 7 continents. Then the process to create the drop-down is, to create a list of all the 7 Continents or any other items you want to create a dropdown for. Go to the cell where you want to place the dropdown> go to Data ribbon> Data validation> allow the value as List and select the source of the list. Now you have your drop-down list.

• Make a Reusable Chart Template

Creating graphs and charts is a basic function of Excel. However, we often come across a few complex charts that need to be created repeatedly every time new data is fed. In such a scenario, you can create a chart once and then save it as a template for further projects. Just create a chart, right-click, save it as a template, and provide a name to the chart as per your requirements.

Excel is a vast collection of functions, formulas, tricks, and tools. Try using the five hidden tricks in Excel to make your work easier and less complicated, and let us know which trick worked best for you, in the comment section.