Whether you occasionally analyze and manage data, or are a full-time data analyst, Excel helps you collect, validate, organize, visualize, and generate reports for sharing information. Excel is used for data management across a range of industries, whether you work for a non-profit, government agency, or business, Excel is helpful for organizing data, including validating and tabulating results.
Some of the ways in which Excel is useful with data management and analytics include:
Data Validation
Excel helps you validate data and maintain data integrity through rules and constraints on cell inputs. You can prevent errors, and ensure that your data remains accurate and consistent by applying data validation rules to your Excel sheets. Data validation can limit cell inputs to a specific range or type of data, creating drop-down lists that allow for only specific inputs, and setting custom error messages.
PivotTables
Excel PivotTables are valuable for summarizing and analyzing large datasets. You can use PivotTables to gain insights from your data that may not otherwise be possible. A PivotTable summarizes large amounts of data interactively, making it possible to analyze large amounts of data in a way that is easy to read and interpret through aggregation and summarizing. The summarized data allows for drill-down details through expansion and collapsing of views that show more or less detail. PivotTables are named because of their ability to pivot rows to columns, or vice-versa. You can use a PivotTable to view summaries of data in different ways, and present clear, concise summaries of complex data.
Formulas and Functions
The ability to tabulate and calculate across a large data set makes Excel’s formulas and functions an integral tool if you need to manage and analyze data. With built-in formulas and functions that can tally the sum or average of a data set, or VLOOKUP and IF that can help perform complex calculations and automate data analysis, Excel is your partner in organizing data. Excel also includes advanced functions to match specific data and create summaries if conditions are matched.
Data Visualization
Excel helps you communicate data with data visualization. Using bar charts, line graphs, pie charts, and scatter plots, visual representations of data make it easier to understand results of data analysis. Because data that is summarized, organized, and tabulated also needs to be communicated, these data visualization capabilities help to tell the stories behind the numbers, making it easier to show relationships between data, proportions, and trends.
Data management with Excel
Excel helps with data analysis and reporting. Using validation, formulas, PivotTables, and data visualization, you can interpret data more quickly and accurately, while communicating results more clearly. You can learn many of these skills in Excel courses that are available in many locations near you.