35 shortcuts & tricks to make you an #AWESOME Data Analyst
Analyst’s life is busy. We have to gather data, clean it up, analyze it, dig the stories buried in it, present them, convince our bosses about the truth, gather more evidence, run tests, simulations or scenarios, share more insights, grab a cup of coffee and start all over again with a different problem.
So today let me share with you 35 shortcuts, productivity hacks and tricks to help you be even more awesome.
18 Tips to Make you an Excel Formatting Pro
We can take any Excel workbook and format it until Christmas, and we would still not be done. But not many of us have so much of time or energy. So, today, lets talk formatting.
In this, you will learn how to
1) Use tables to format data quickly
2) Change colors of your worksheet in a snap
3) Use cell styles
4) Quickly clone formatting using format painter
5) Clear formats to begin with a clean-slate
6) Formatting shortcuts
7) Formatting options for print
and 8 ) Why you should not go overboard formatting and 10 other tips.
So go ahead and become a formatting pro.
Top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel Charts
We all know that learning a few keyboard shortcuts can speedup your Excel game. Most pro users rely on a handful shortcuts when working with large spreadsheets. But when it comes to charting, we automatically reach for mouse. But do you know that you can use few simple shortcuts to do most day to day chart related things?
Ready for top 5 keyboard shortcuts for Excel charts? Read on.
Copy Paste Visible Cells only (Two more ways to do it)
Last week, we talked about how to copy and paste visible cells alone (ie exclude any filtered rows or hidden columns etc.) In the comments section many of you suggested two more ways to deal with this annoying problem. Let’s take a look them.
Copy & paste visible cells only [Excel Trick]
Here is something annoying with Excel.
Open any Excel file with few columns of data. Hide some of those columns (select the columns and press CTRL+0). Now, copy a few rows of data. Paste it else where. Excel will paste the values in hidden columns too. We thought Excel would omit the values in hidden columns.
What the filter Excel?!? I thought we were friends, but you annoy me with some of these quirks.
Jo’s first keyboard shortcut
Jo, my lovely wife quit her job as my partner in crime at Chandoo.org recently and took up a lucrative position at NZ govt. agency. The other day I asked her “how was your day?” when she got home. She smiled and said, “I learned my first Excel shortcut!”.
Guess what it is?
F4.
That is right. The mighty F4 key. You can use it to repeat any action.
Jo was using it to insert rows in her workbook. After inserting first row (using CTRL+ of course), she would press F4 to add more rows as needed.
Hide columns one one tab same way as they were in another place [quick tip]
One of the regular reporting tasks I do involves a manual step I hated. It goes like this:
- Dump several columns of data in the template file.
- Hide a particular set of columns (these are not together, so must be done one at a time or with CTRL+selection)
- Save and publish the file.
After doing this manually for last few fortnights, today I wanted to automate the column hide process. I was about to write a VBA macro to clone the hide settings from one workbook to another. But then I thought, may be paste special can be of use.
And what do you know. It does exactly that.