Things I learned about excel this week

kelkel — Sat, 24 Jan 2009 16:26:04 +0000

Excel is a frequently used tool in accounting. Almost everything I do at my internship is in MS Excel. I expected this, but I didn’t really know what to learn about excel, beyond the basics, that would prepare me for this. So here are a couple of small, but super-useful things I learned in the last couple of weeks. (In addition to already having a good basic knowledge of Excel).

Alt+Enter
This will allow you to move down a line, but stay in the same cell. I have to use this all the time at work, because we type out long paragraphs of explanation in one cell, to explain our procedures and results.
Vlookup function
I knew this function existed, and I could tell when it would be useful to use, but I have always had trouble implementing it.

Vlookup is good when you are trying to combine 2 excel tables that have one unique identifier in common. For example, 2 tables have a column with invoice numbers, but they have different information about the same invoices. These tips will probably make more sense when you actually try to use it. Just know that it is very possible you will have to use this function a lot!

In the table you are pulling information *from*, make sure that your unqiue id you will be looking up (invoice numbers) is in the left-most column.
In the Vlookup function, be sure to use $ signs to anchor your table array, if you are copying and pasting the function into a lot of cells. So if you are pulling from a table that is cells A3:N3003 for example, make sure that you type it in is $A$3:$N$3003. Otherwise, when you paste the formula, it will change the array numbers.

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Things I learned about excel this week