10 Best Excel Tips for Beginners

hi there Jamie heat here today at teachers tech hope you're having a great day today I want to give you 10 tips to get more out of Excel so these are beginner tips that maybe you're just working with Excel or maybe you have been working for a while these are 10 tips that just will make things a little bit more efficient for you and save you some time if you're looking more for the tutorial type of videos check out the other ones I have listed for Microsoft Office remember I put out weekly tech tips so if you're interested in getting notified when they come out hit that little Bell notification beside the subscribe button and then you're gonna get notified when my new videos come out let's get started on these 10 fantastic tips here today for Excel

before we get started here today I'd love to hear from you if you have any great tips that you could recommend for beginners just write it down in the description below and maybe I can take those examples that you give me and put them in a different video so let's get started with tip 1 and tip 1 is quick analysis it's called so I already have a table here that I have of the top 10 grossing movies of all time and I just want to do some quick analysis on it if I click anywhere inside the table here I'm just gonna click up here in the first one and then if I just go down and highlight I'm just gonna highlight here notice that I have this quick analysis icon that pops up so if I go ahead and click on it you'll see that you get all these different things that you can quickly apply to your table so from formatting you can see if I go across how I can quickly add some formatting if I wanted to do some totals here if I go to this part you can see how I can i click on totals and if I wanted to go through different ones how the totals just automatically pop up there so very quick to do the thing I like to is the charts so if I go over to charts and click on it here you can see how I can just see these charts in a hurry and if I wanted to add them I can click them and boom they're right in my on my spreadsheet right away so this is a great thing to speed up a lot of time a lot of people don't realize that little quick analysis is there just go ahead when you have your table click on it and see all the options that you have a great feature is

the filter feature so let's say if you have a table with a lot of information in it and you just want to find something in a hurry to just take out other parts to try it so in this case I'm gonna just click inside this short table that I have here to give you an example I'm gonna click on Avatar so I'm inside the table I'm gonna go up to data here click on data and now this is the filter what I want so if I'm gonna click on it notice across the top here little arrows dropdowns I have some choice so what I like about this is let's say by year if I was gonna look for something in a specific year and you could imagine if this is a really long list if I click on this I'm gonna go down here to the bottom and I could do some searching here but I'm just gonna use the check marks here so I'm gonna go select all and say I just want to find something in 2011 click on it he had okay and it just shows me the movie that was in 2011 from the list that I have from the table so I could go back select them all hit OK and they're all back again so maybe I'm looking by studio I could go back and click on collect them and I want to see everything from Paramount hit ok and there I go so I love this feature of just sorting through tables especially if they're long take a look at some of the other options under the filter you can do because you can see how you can sort by largest to smallest and go ahead and try different ones or number filters if you had some greater than between you can see averages and different things like that so this can save you a lot of time just by clicking on inside the table going to data and hitting that feature here's a really quick tip for

you and it's just about how to move around on your worksheet so if I'm inside this table here I could use my arrows to go around but if you hold down the control key and Moot hit your arrows it'll just jumped quickly to the end parts of it you can see right now I'm holding down control and as I use my arrows it goes to all the different parts that quickly to the corners of it to the ends so it's just a quick way to manage your worksheet to get to a particular cell here's another important

tip for you to know now when you have certain column widths that aren't wide enough you could drag them you could grab and drag and go through each one and drag till it fits but you can just simply double click on that spot so if I go in between the column where the line is and double click it automatically adjusts so another thing is I'm just gonna hit back a couple times to get back this if I select everything by going up to the top left hand corner and just clicking and now I pick any one in between double click and it adjusts all the rows to fit nicely on it so that's a quick tip I do use that a lot especially if I'm copying pasting over from different different spots and this way I can just simply correct all the widths in a hurry

flash fill and autofill are both great time-saving features inside Microsoft Excel so if I was typing unless and I already had these email lists here and if I went over to here and I just start typing the first name and as soon as I go down to the next one and start typing notice it starts to fill in my choices and fill in the rest of the column there because it recognized the pattern how it did first name last name and all I have to do is hit enter at this point and it fills in the column based on the pattern that it was showing from the first cell so that's called flash fill now with autofill if we went to a different one if I just put in the number like one I could just simply click on this and drag it down like so and it just copies everything down the other thing you can do if I put in the number one here if you just double click right on it and it automatically fills the column based to the same size to the left of it there but this can also recognize patterns so what I mean by this if I put one in the first one and two in the next one and I highlight both like this and then drag them down it will continue on with the pattern that a recognized BK as G is highlighted the first two cells on this one this does work with other things like dates so if I was typing in with months here if I typed in January and then just simply double click and it would fill in matching to the next column on this one I could even put dates on this one so if I was putting let's put the year and right away it's going to recognize that that's a date and as it goes down it's just going to progress like that so these are some great time-saving features just to quickly fill in cells when you're inputting that data here's a

very important tip for you if you're new to excel and that's understanding the difference between a relative reference cell to a absolute so now in this case I'm going to create a formula here just giving it an amount to the quantity and cost here and I'm going to copy it down so I'm going to just put in equals this and I'm gonna say multiplied by the quantity and I'm going to get the amount so this cell right here is a relative reference point here because if I copy this down you can see as I click through each one and look at the formula how it changed so now it's D 5 times C 5 and this was d4 to c4 so it's changing as I copied it down it's giving the correct formula now if I wanted to apply in this case a discount to this so I'm gonna have this an equal as my formula and I'm gonna have the amount and I'm going to say multiplied here by this 12% discount and I'm gonna hit enter so this is correct it would be 251 on this one but the issue arises if I copy this down like this you can see I get all these mistakes here now what's happening here so if I click on this one and look at it efore times c1 well that's correct but if I click on the next spot it says 'if I've times c2 well c2 is right here I needed to stay on that cell so I need to say as an absolute on that one so this is how you do that so if I go back up to this one I need to make sure I put a dollar sign in front of the letter but not only the letter I need to put it in front of the number two to make that an absolute spot so I needed to stay in c1 all the time so now if I copy this down like this I get all the correct ones because now if I click on it you can see it's still c1 c1 now the other one is changing to this but I needed to make sure I had an absolute cell reference for that second part there so that's a very important tip so to help you out when you're creating your formulas to make sure you understand the difference between the relative reference and the absolute point let's say you wanted to make your

rows the columns and columns or rows so we're going to transpose I'm going to use this example of the movies here we're going to reverse our - arose so how you do this here is I'm just gonna go ahead and select my table like this and I'm gonna copy right click copy and I'm just gonna move over and right click this time go to paste special so I'm gonna click paste special and there you go right there you check transpose and this will do the reversal and I paste it and you can see we have some formatting that doesn't fit but like I showed you before to quickly highlight everything double click and now you can see it took the name of the movies that was in this column and went across as rows across so that's how you reverse it or transpose it very quickly if you just wanted to change the look of your table that you have let's say you

have a list typed out in let's say word or maybe someone emailed something to you in a list and you want to put it into an Excel spreadsheet so here's an example when I take this right here so I'm just gonna right click and copy this and go over and paste it into my worksheet over here so when we paste it doesn't separate it into different columns and a spreadsheet that's kind of what I want so I can apply different formulas and different to different reference points inside the worksheet so one thing we can do and I have it highlighted right now is go up to data and then go ahead and pick text to column so I'm gonna go ahead and click on this here and now with this what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna leave it at delimited here so characters such as commas and tabs separated each field so when I got this one that's how I had it separated is by commas now I'm gonna go ahead and hit next and what do I have it separated by will call it with comma so if you don't have it selected already can select it and you can see as soon as I pick comma it separates it into the different one so if it was separated by tab or semicolon I would choose those so I'm gonna go ahead and hit next and I'm gonna hit finish on this one I'm just going to go ahead and make the adjustment here so now you have each of these in their own column and you can start applying maybe different formulas to this and this will save you a lot of time rather than having to go to each one and put it into a separate column on your cheat let's say you wanted to put some

images into your worksheet really simple way to do this is through screenshots so I'm just going to go up to insert and I'm just gonna use the worksheet that I have open right now and you can see screenshot is right here so I'm gonna go ahead and click on it and then I'm going to just click on the word document that I have open here that I showed you previously and it just took a snapshot of that so the thing I can do to this though I can still edit this I can go to it and crop if I wanted a certain part of it crop so I can take the handles and move them in and as soon as I click off it makes the crop now what I like to do is sometimes when you use the screenshot is to select a certain area so I'm gonna go back to insert to screenshot and this time I'm going to go to screen clipping so maybe and now I have the website open I just want to take this image a screen rate of this I'm going to select this area and let go and now this is inside my document so it's a very quick way to get some images right inside to your worksheet so maybe you want to see where

all the formulas are on your worksheet so just at a glance you just want to know with each cell where the formula is so a quick way to do this is to just click on the worksheet you're on and then hold down control and press tilde so tilde is right beside my number one key to the left so when you hit control hold that down and press tilde and you can see right away now I see all the formulas on a worksheet the nice thing about this is I can just toggle it back and forth when I press it again it goes back at any time if you knew where the formula was I could just simply double click on it and you can see where it's going to be that individual cell but I really like that control till the feature to see all the cells where the formulas are at once so I hope you like these 10 tips of a they're aimed more at the beginner I'm gonna have more tips that come out to help everybody at different levels inside Excel remember I do have a lot of other tech videos over a lot of different topics so hit that subscribe button if you thought this was useful today please share this with a few other people hit that like button thanks for watching this time and I'll see you next time here at teachers tech