Do you use spreadsheets a lot? I bet you’ve seen your fair share of error codes. Try these easy one-minute fixes.
Struggling with Excel? 3 tips and tutorials to help you out
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Ah, Excel. It’s been around since the ’80s, yet it can still stump many of us. There’s a lot to learn, from creating complex formulas to navigating pivot tables.
So, where do you turn? You can buy a paid course, which will give you a lot of bang for your buck, but you can also start smaller — and free.
Here are a few resources to get you started. This tip is sponsored by Oracle NetSuite, the world’s No. 1 cloud business system.
1. Clean up your data
The first rule of Excel: The cleaner your data, the better. There are countless ways typos, spaces and odd characters can gum up the works. Tap or click here for a great resource from Microsoft: The top ways to clean up your data. You’ll find a list of the most common mistakes and steps for cleaning them up.
2. Watch some high-quality tutorials
Seeing a program in use is much easier than reading about it. YouTube is great for this, and many high-quality channels are out there. MotionTraining has a great beginner’s series and videos that cover all the basics. TeachExcel is a popular channel with 169,000 subscribers and quick videos on just about anything you want to be done in Excel.
3. Find templates to do the work for you
There are lots of pre-made templates you can download right from Microsoft. Downloading from the source is nice because you know they are safe to use and will get the job done. Tap or click to see Microsoft’s offerings, from nutritional recipe calculators to finance balance sheets.
Bonus: For your financials, move to software that makes the job easy.
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This $39 course bundle can help you master Microsoft Excel
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For many of us, working with spreadsheets and formulas does not come naturally. Yet, as data takes an ever bigger role in the workplace, number-crunching skills are becoming essential to many careers.
If you want to improve your data skills, the Professional Microsoft Excel Certification Training Bundle offers a great education from the comfort of home. This learning library offers 45 hours of beginner-friendly video tutorials, covering a wide range of important skills.
Microsoft Copilot’s getting smarter: Better late than never, I suppose. Look for two new deep reasoning agents in April. Researcher can dig through multiple sources and pull insights from third-party tools like Salesforce, while Analyst can turn messy data into clean spreadsheets.
Freeze frame: In Excel, it helps to keep your column and row headings stuck in place while you scroll around big spreadsheets. Select the cell where the actual data starts, and then click the View menu > Freeze Panes.
It went data way: Soon, you can send files directly from Google Drive or Microsoft OneDrive to ChatGPT rather than saving them to your desktop and uploading them to the AI assistant. There’s a new ChatGPT feature to make sweet interactive charts and tables from your spreadsheets. And there goes another job because of AI.