In the world of Microsoft, macros are the way many users automate various steps of their daily processes. There are two basic types of macros, recorded and coded. Recorded macros are what most users are familiar with. as they are simple to create and simple to use. Coded macros are less common, as require knowledge of Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). Recorded macros tend to be more forgiving than coded ones, especially since one character out of place in a coded macro will render the whole macro useless.
Check out this video on creating recorded macros and coded macros, and some of the differences between the two:
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When working with large chunks of data, we sometimes need to sort the data to figure out where we need to focus our attention. This could mean that we need to quickly sort our data by more than one column, allowing us to make decisions on which path to take, without having to create new Excel template in that moment.
There are a number of ways to sort data in Excel, but using the Sort command (located on the Data tab of the ribbon) is the easiest, as the sort order you see is the sort order you get. The nice thing about the dialog box used for the Sort command is that it is easy to add, delete, or rearrange sort levels. Other methods of sorting data, ones in which you do not use the Sort dialog box, can cause issues, can be more problematic, especially if you try to undo and redo the sorting at a later time.
Having column headers makes the whole process easier, but sometimes raw data downloaded from a database does not give us column headers. The good news is that it does not keep you from sorting your data, as there is an option checkbox for data without headers, but you must know which columns to sort when this happens.
Follow the steps of in this video to sort data using multiple columns:
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Hiding certain rows or columns in Excel can make viewing complex, detailed information easier to read. Grouping Rows in Excel allows you to quickly collapse and expand similar data to create more useful views.
Select the rows with similar data by clicking and dragging on the rows numbers to the left of your data. Note that your grouping sections must be contiguous. Control-clicking won’t work.
Click on Group under the Data tab. Grouping sections 1 and 2 will appear to the left as shown in this example. Repeat this process for all of the contiguous sections in your data.
Collapse specific sections by clicking on the “–” sign, or expand them by clicking on the “+” sign.
Collapse all similar sections by clicking on the 1 in the column label row. The 2 will expand all of the similar sections.
