After 30 years, Microsoft Excel remains ubiquitous in business.

After 30 years, Microsoft Excel remains ubiquitous in business. The world’s quarter of a billion knowledge
workers on average spend half an hour in the application every day. But despite this, Excel’s full capabilities
are still poorly understood. Of 100,000 workers we've tested over the past three years, less than half know
what Conditional Formatting - an essential feature - even does.
So what are Excel’s essentials? We reviewed articles written by Excel experts and combined this with aggre-
gated data from thousands of our customers to compile a list of the 100 most important Excel functions,
features, tips, tricks and hacks, ordered by utility. Where are your favourites?
How to use it
How many do you already know? Excel experts should know 80+, proficient users 60+, average users 40+ and
if you know fewer than 40, we’d class you as a beginner. Scan the list for tricks which:
a) you agree will be useful for you
b) you don’t yet know
c) ideally don’t take too long to learn
If you can find a handful that fulfil these criteria, learn them and become a more powerful human!

For each tip, there are
several stats:
Percentage of Excel With Business users who answered the filter
questions of the Excel course correctly.
Foundation
Presentation
Orientation & Efficiency
Admin
Data Handling
Data Analysis
Measure of complexity, sophistication and conceptual trickiness. Out of 5.
How useful it is, as judged by our internal experts, dozens of experts worldwide
and the usage data of our several hundred thousand customers. Out of 100.
Which of these Excel
categories this tip
belongs to:
Time in minutes the average learner takes to get from no knowledge to
proficient.
Questions:

1 Conditional Formatting
2 PivotTables
3 Paste Special
4 Add Multiple Rows
5 Absolute References ($)
6 Print Optimisation
7 Extend Formula Across/Down
8 Flash Fill
9 INDEX-MATCH
10 Filters
11 SUM
12 Ctrl Z
13 Format Cells
14 VLOOKUP
15 Ctrl C
16 Ctrl V
17 Basic Arithmetic
18 COUNT and COUNTA
19 Remove Duplicates
20 COUNTIF
21 Options Advanced
22 Charts
23 Freeze Panes
24 SUMIF
25 Protect Sheet
26 F4
27 Sort
28 Save As (F12)
29 Move or Copy Column/Row
30 Ctrl (Arrows, PG Up, Etc)
31 IF
32 Linking Cells (EG '=A1=B1')
33 Wrap Text
34 IF and ISERROR
35 Data Validation
36 Use of '(Apostrophe)
37 Resize Columns/Rows
38 F2
39 Alt Enter
40 Number Formats
41 Layout, Design & Formatting
42 Redo (Ctrl Y)
43 Cumulative Sum
44 Find and Replace
45 & and CONCATENATE
46 Extend Selection
47 Slicers
48 Ctrl Tab
49 MAX, MIN
50 Comments
51 Forecast
52 Insert Symbols
53 FIND
54 Customise Status Bar
55 LEN (and LEFT/MID/RIGHT)
56 Average
57 Ctrl Shift A
58 Goal Seek/What-If
59 Select All
60 Precedents & Dependents
61 UPPER, PROPER, Etc
62 Power Pivots
63 Templates
64 Quick Access
65 Ctrl P
66 Group/Ungroup
67 Customising the Ribbon
68 Ctrl S
69 Sparkline
70 Copy-Drag Worksheet
71 Macros & VBA
72 AND
73 Rotate Text
74 Insert (Ctrl Shift +)
75 Autocorrect
76 Right-Click on Cell
77 AutoSum (Alt =)
78 Text to Columns
79 Ctrl Space
80 RANDBETWEEN
81 Tables
82 Named Ranges/Name Manager
83 Double Click to Rename Sheet
84 Date and Time Functions
85 Calculate Discounts/Growth
86 Double Click Format Printer
87 Timeline
88 New Workbook (Shift-F11)
89 Ctrl 5 (Strikethrough)
90 INDIRECT
91 Italicise and Embolden
92 Rounding
93 Waterfall Chart
94 3D Sum
95 Get External Data (From Web)
96 Show Formulas (CTRL ¬)
97 Ctrl U [Underline]
98 Tell Me What You Want to Do
99 Shift Space
100 Delete Row (CTRL 9)
The top 100 tips
Click on a tip to jump straight to it!

Making sense of our data-rich, noisy world is hard but vital. Used well, Conditional Formatting brings out
the patterns of the universe, as captured by your spreadsheet. That's why Excel experts and Excel users
alike vote this the #1 most important feature. This can be sophisticated. But even the simplest colour
changes can be hugely beneficial. Suppose you have volumes sold by sales staff each month. Just three
clicks can reveal the top 10% performing salespeople and tee up an important business conversation.
A cell changes colour, depending on the number entered into it. What's going on?
A. Conditional formatting - user-defined rules are changing the colour
B. Error checking - Excel is automatically spotting problematic data entries
C. Data validation - a way of controlling user input
01. Conditional Formatting
100 3 180 min Presentation
Next

At 4 hours to get to proficiency, you may be put off learning PivotTables but don't be. Use them to sort,
count, total or average data stored in one large spreadsheet and display them in a new table, cut howev-
er you want. That's the key thing here. If you want to look only at sales figures for certain countries,
product lines or marketing channels, it's trivial. Warning: make sure your data is clean first!
Which best describes the function of PivotTables?
A. They are a way of allowing users to enter data into Excel
B. They are a set of formatting templates for data
C. They allow tables of data to be summarised in a flexible way
02. PivotTables
94.8 3 240 min Data Analysis
Back NextIndex

Back NextIndex
Grabbing (ie Copying) some data from one cell and pasting it into another cell is one of the most
common activities in Excel. But there's a lot you might copy (formatting, value, formula, comments, etc)
and sometimes you won't want to copy all of it. The most common example of this is where you want to
lose the formatting - the place this data is going is your own spreadsheet with your own styling. It's
annoying and ugly to plonk in formatting from elsewhere. So just copy the values and all you'll get is the
text, number, whatever the value is. The shortcut after copying the cell (Ctrl C) is Alt E S V - easier to do
than it sounds.
The other big one is Transpose. This flips rows and columns around in seconds. Shortcut Alt E S E.
03. Paste Special
87.9 1 10 min Orientation & Efficiency

Back NextIndex
Probably one of the most frequently carried out activities in spreadsheeting. Ctrl Shift + is the shortcut,
but actually it takes longer than just right-clicking on the row numbers on the left of the Excel display.
So Right Click is our recommendation. And if you want to add more than one, select as many rows or
columns as you'd like to add and then Right Click and add.
04. Add Multiple Rows
87.5 0 10 min Orientation & Efficiency