Microsoft Excel Features

Sparklines - Tiny charts embedded in a cell and give a visual trend summary alongside your data. A sparkline makes a pattern more obvious to the eye to make spotting trends easier.

Summary Sheet - Combine and calculate data from multiple worksheets onto one worksheet to summarize data. An example would be if you are collecting sales data from several locations and each location is on its own worksheet, you can calculate company totals on a summary sheet by referring to the data on individual sheets.

What-if-analysis - Change the values in cells to see how those changes affect the outcome of formulas on the worksheet. Goal Seek is an example of a data tool used for what-if-analysis. With Goal Seek, you can work backward from the desired outcome to find the number necessary to achieve your goal. Goal Seek can be applied, for example, if you want to make a mortgage payment of a set dollar amount, at a given interest rate, Goal Seek will tell you the total amount of a loan you can afford.Turn ordinary text or graphics into a hyperlink when using the hyperlink feature. When the user clicks a hyperlink, they will be taken to another location, such as a web page, another location on the same page,or an e-mail form.

VLookup or HLookup - Used to find a value in cell in another part of the workbook by typing in a corresponding value. The lookup feature can be applied, for instance, if you type in a name and have Excel look up the phone number or address of that person from an existing table in another part of the workbook. The choice of VLookup or HLookup will depend if the data is arranged horizonally or vertically.

Pivot Table - Is a data summarization tool used to automatically sort, count, total or give the average of the data stored in one table or spreadsheet. Organizations gather large amounts of numerical data, but it is not useful until it is organized in a way that reveals patterns or trends. With PivotTables, you can easily rearrange the data so that more than one trend or pattern can be observed. The data appears in an interactive, cross-tabulated report.