Microsoft Excel in Data Analytics

Microsoft excel is a powerful software tool which is not only capable of doing the basic data computation but it will also help you in accomplishing your data analysis job successfully. Microsoft excel will embrace you with several ways by which you can analyse and interpret the raw and uncouth data. Excel is crammed with many commands, functions and tools which will make your data analysis job more facile and simpler. With excel, you can easily get rid of many time consuming and intricate calculations. Below, we are going to mention how you can perform your data analysis job effortlessly using excel.

Sorting and filtering: In your data analysis process, or during the display of certain important data, you might need to sort and filter your data. By using sorting and filtering options that you have in your excel sheet, you can easily accomplish this task.

Functions and commands: You need to know certain functions or commands of excel which will help you to analyse the data aptly.

• Lookup function: excel Lookup Functions will help you to find successfully the data value that matches the defined criteria from the bulk of data. Vlookup() function helps you to search a value in a table and gradually, returns a corresponding value.
• Concatenate: This function actually helps you in combining text from two or more cells into one single cell.
• Lower (), Upper (), and Proper (): All of three functions help in changing the text to lower, upper and sentence case respectively. These functions are very imperative for data analysis as they help you in converting classes of different case to a single case.
• If (): this is another valuable function in excel. It assists you in using the conditional formulas which calculate in one way when a particular thing is true, and another way when it is false.

Pivot table: Often you need to do data analysis on a large set of data, particularly when you are handling the data of a company. In this case, you need to perform certain tasks like summarizing the data, obtaining the required values and presenting the results so that the company can draw a fruitful conclusion. Thus, excel provides you with the PivotTable which helps you in summarizing thousands of data values simply and hastily so that you can obtain the much-needed results. Basically, PivotTable converts a data table to inference table which will simplify your decision-making job. You can easily create by following some simple steps.

• At first, you need to click somewhere in your data list.
• Then, click the insert tab.
• And, finally, click PivotTable.

It would be a prudent decision for you if you place the PivotTable on a new worksheet. So, for this first, you need to click new worksheet for the location and then, click OK to confirm it. If you don’t have an adequate knowledge about the PivotTables or do not know which fields to select from the data, then you can go for the Recommended PivotTables that excel often provides to its users.

Charts: You can conveniently create a chart or graph in excel by selecting the range of data you wish to place in the chart and press F11. This will automatically create an excel chart in default style but you can change it easily by selecting different chart styles. If you want to place the chart on the same worksheet as the data, then you must press ALT + F1 instead of F11.

Remove duplicate values: Excel owns inbuilt feature which will help you to remove duplicate values from a table. This feature usually removes the duplicate or identical values from given table based on the selected columns. Suppose, you have selected two columns then it searches for duplicate value having same combination of both columns data.

Multiple worksheets: Very often you need to work on multiple worksheets specially if you need to track the sale information for all the regions of a particular product. First, you need to start with a blank workbook and name the worksheet on your product name (suppose you are dealing with the mobile phones, then name the worksheet as “mobile phones”.). Now add four blank sheets and name them east, west, north and south. All these sheets will have the same structure and if you select any of them and click the option” select all the sheets”, then all of them will be selected.

The above we mentioned only the prime and essential functions of excel that you need to use frequently while executing the data analysis process. Though excel is a robust tool but it is not a big data tool. If you need to do data computations of 2000000 entries, then excel will encounter with a chunk of issues and starts struggling.

Author Bio:

Sarena George works as a Digital Marketing Expert for Chi Square Academy. Chi Square Academy aims to create a better tomorrow through learning and teaching. The Academy provides courses in Data Analytics and other  courses that matches job trends from time to time.