5 Useful Hacks to Boost Your Excel Efficiency!

Microsoft Excel is a powerful data analytics tool all media and marketing professionals use on a basis, but few are efficient and effective!

Hack #1 The double click

One of the most frequent pet peeves with Excel is the sheer volume of data involved.

What if it could be massively reduced with a simple (double) click?

If you have large sets of data that require the same formula, you don’t need to drag or copy the original cells across.

Simply place your cursor over the bottom right corner of the cell, and click twice.

Your formula will be copied for as many cells as you have adjacent data!

Hack #2 The shortcut

When you hop into a taxi, you always make sure the driver takes the shortest route, because time is money.

Excel isn’t any different.

By resting your cursor over the option you’re looking to use, it will display the corresponding shortcut!

Make note of as many shortcuts as you can retain.

The more you use them, the less time you’ll waste getting stuff done!

Hack #3 The colour code

Your Excel spreadsheet doesn’t have to look like numerical code from the Matrix movies.

Colour coding is an effective way to visual tag information to become more productive.

Remember the woman in the red dress?

She stood out because of the contrast between her red dress and the black suits within The Matrix.

By colour-coding various elements of your sheets, you’ll have instantly visible reference points for your eyes to find items more quickly. And as you develop this approach, people will start to mention how pretty your data looks!

Hack #4 The isolation trick

It’s Friday night, and you’re looking for a specific movie on Netflix, but you can’t quite remember the name.

It’s the one with the where the guy takes the red pill…

Do you search aimlessly for hours or do you try to narrow the results?

You think it starts with the letter M.

In Excel, filters have the ability to help you reduce the data you have to go through.

Add a filter by clicking the Data tab and selecting “Filter.”

Next, click the arrow next to the column headers and you’ll be able to choose to show your data in ascending or descending order, as well as the individual rows you want to include (versus exclude).

Hack #5 The re-purpose

Don’t let your hard work go to waste, re-purpose it.

If you have a regular worksheet, such as calculating monthly campaign ROI, don’t re-create it each month.

Instead, make a copy and re-use it.

To do this, simply right-click on the worksheet tab and select “Copy”.

You can then save the worksheet as you update it each month.

We hope these simple hacks have taken you a step closer to leveraging the power of Microsoft Excel.

And be sure to come back for the third instalment in this 4-part series!

Missed the first instalment? CLICK HERE!