Ok, Coffee can be one of them, but may be after the 3rd mug of the day, you will ask the question, “so, what are the productivity secrets of Excel 2007?”.
That, my friend, is the reason why you should put aside the mug and read this post carefully. The post is pure filtered decoction of tips you must sip.
if you like this post (or for that matter if you like coffee) please add it to your delicious bookmarks or stumble it or tweet it.
Thanks, You are beautiful.
Turn on the Clipboard pane, Copy paste like there is no tomorrow
We all swear by ctrl+c, ctrl+v. A large part of my MBA case studies were submitted intime thanks only to the awesome clipboard. But do you know that you can turn on the clipboard feature in Excel 2007 in a full panel view and use it to speed up the copy paste activity.
Hold Down ALT to see what keyboard shortcuts are available, press key and you will see more
All you have to do is hold the ALT key down. And I can bet that you will learn a fun and simple keyboard shortcut for something that you use everyday. What more, in Excel 2007 you can use most of the Excel 2003 (and earlier) keyboard shortcuts.
Lock a feature to Boost up your performance, for eg. lock format painter and paste formats everywhere
When you need to perform certain action several times, like for eg. if you want to paste the same formatting over 40 different cells, you can lock the format painter by double clicking on it. See the screencast to understand how it works.
(When you can inserting shapes etc, you can use “lock drawing mode” option from right click menu)
Make your charts and tables go everywhere, copy them as pictures
When you copy a chart / table of cells as picture, they take less space and look lot better when pasted.
Add Invisible / Hidden features to your Quick Access Toolbar
You can add hidden features of excel 2007 like camera tool etc. to the quick access toolbar (the tools that you usually see next to office button). Just click on the office button > Excel options > Customize and select “commands not in the ribbon”. These are the features that are not usually shown on ribbon (some of them are shown when you lets say select a chart or table or something like that).
Move the Quick Access Toolbar down to save mouse travel time
I think that title says it all. See the image.
Always save the files in Excel 2003-97 compatible mode
Very useful if your colleagues / clients are still using old versions. Just go to Office button > Excel Options > Save and change the file type to Excel 2003-97.
Click on the corner of a group of Ribbon Icons to launch its UI
This is not applicable for all groups. But for some groups of icons you see a little squarish icon on the bottom right corner. Just hit it to launch a friendly office 2003ish looking dialog to make changes to the settings etc.
Add chart related options to Quick Access Toolbar to save time
If you make a lot of charts, then it pays to add the chart related options like “adding error bars”, “adding axis” etc. to the quick access toolbar. Then you can press ALT+number to activate this feature and work with it without even moving your mouse.
Create a named range quickly by typing the name in the corner of formula bar
You can quickly create a named range by selecting a bunch of cells and typing the name in the formula bar’s left hand corner where usually cell address’ is displayed.
See the screencast.
BONUS: Enable Developer Ribbon Toolbar in Excel 2007
If you in to mochas and trying to explore macros, then this one is for you. Enable the Developer toolbar from Excel options > Popular and you can play with all those form controls and macros.
More Tips and Tricks on using Microsoft Excel
Did you enjoy the post? Do you want more ? Well, it is not coffee, so you can consume as much as you want. Start with these and see where your mouse takes you.
Excel Productivity – Advanced Tips & Tricks
Excel can be Exciting – 15 hacks you don’t know
100 Excel Tips, Tricks and Resources
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8 Responses to “Pivot Tables from large data-sets – 5 examples”
Do you have links to any sites that can provide free, large, test data sets. Both large in diversity and large in total number of rows.
Good question Ron. I suggest checking out kaggle.com, data.world or create your own with randbetween(). You can also get a complex business data-set from Microsoft Power BI website. It is contoso retail data.
Hi Chandoo,
I work with large data sets all the time (80-200MB files with 100Ks of rows and 20-40 columns) and I've taken a few steps to reduce the size (20-60MB) so they can better shared and work more quickly. These steps include: creating custom calculations in the pivot instead of having additional data columns, deleting the data tab and saving as an xlsb. I've even tried indexmatch instead of vlookup--although I'm not sure that saved much. Are there any other tricks to further reduce the file size? thanks, Steve
Hi Steve,
Good tips on how to reduce the file size and / or process time. Another thing I would definitely try is to use Data Model to load the data rather than keep it in the file. You would be,
1. connect to source data file thru Power Query
2. filter away any columns / rows that are not needed
3. load the data to model
4. make pivots from it
This would reduce the file size while providing all the answers you need.
Give it a try. See this video for some help - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u7bpysO3FQ
Normally when Excel processes data it utilizes all four cores on a processor. Is it true that Excel reduces to only using two cores When calculating tables? Same issue if there were two cores present, it would reduce to one in a table?
I ask because, I have personally noticed when i use tables the data is much slower than if I would have filtered it. I like tables for obvious reasons when working with datasets. Is this true.
John:
I don't know if it is true that Excel Table processing only uses 2 threads/cores, but it is entirely possible. The program has to be enabled to handle multiple parallel threads. Excel Lists/Tables were added long ago, at a time when 2 processes was a reasonable upper limit. And, it could be that there simply is no way to program table processing to use more than 2 threads at a time...
When I've got a large data set, I will set my Excel priority to High thru Task Manager to allow it to use more available processing. Never use RealTime priority or you're completely locked up until Excel finishes.
That is a good tip Jen...