Excel Tutorial Beginner to Advanced - 12-Hour Excel Course

Foreign [Music] says subscribe and click on the Bell icon to receive notifications we've made the accompanying exercise files for this tutorial available for free just click the link below in the video details to get these hello everyone and welcome to this course on an introduction to excel 2021 my name is Deborah Ashby and I've been a Microsoft trainer for about 25 years now in various different forms and I'm going to be your host for this course now Excel 2021 is the latest Standalone release from Microsoft and it opens up many of the features and functionality

currently only available in Microsoft 365 to customers who don't have or maybe don't want to sign up for the subscription service and we're going to explore all of these new features and everything else excel In this course now this course is aimed at Excel novices Excel beginners so if you are brand new to the world of Excel and are looking for guidance or maybe you have some very basic skills and would like to learn more this course is going to give you a great Foundation from which to build from the only prerequisite required is that

you have Excel 2021 downloaded to your PC so before we begin and dive into the content let's run through some Housekeeping so you understand how this course is structured and how everything works so this course has a total of 85 lessons and those 85 lessons are split across 17 logical sections and all of the lessons are bite size so they're between 5 to 15 minutes in length each lesson contains a video where I'll demonstrate to you a discipline in Excel using some course files and those course files are available to download from the course files

folder so that you can Follow along with what I'm doing and throughout this course you'll get a chance to practice what you've learned with end of section exercises and also quizzes so the first thing to do here is to download those course files and make sure that you have them somewhere easily accessible grab yourselves a drink and let's dive straight in once again my name is Deb and I am thrilled to be your host for this course If you're trying to decide whether you want to use Excel 2021 or Excel for Microsoft 365 this lesson

is here to help you make that decision and what you can see on the slide here is just some of the differences between Excel 365 and Excel 2021 now the main difference between these two is that Excel 365 is essentially a subscription service and what that means is that you sign up with Microsoft and you pay a small monthly fee to effectively rent the Software from Microsoft so you don't actually ever own the software and over time if you have that software for a number of years you end up paying a lot more for it

than if you just purchased the software outright and this is the main reason why a lot of people prefer to go for the Standalone version of excel as it's a one-time purchase option and you'll see in a moment the difference in the price and I'm going to show you in a moment where You can go to purchase Excel 2021 and then we can compare it against the subscription service now if you do have a subscription to Microsoft 365 as a subscriber it means that you're automatically going to receive the latest updates directly from Microsoft so

if they make a change to excel that's going to get pushed out to your PC automatically whereas if you've purchased Excel 2021 whilst it is yours to keep and you own that software it Doesn't receive Perpetual update now Excel 365 can be installed on up to five devices so if you're in a household and you have a laptop maybe an iPad maybe another PC if you have a subscription you can install your Microsoft applications on five different devices with Excel 2021 because it's not a subscription service it can only be installed on one device and

I would say that that is a general rule that it can only be installed on one device there Are methods you can use to try and get that onto another PC but in general one device only also with the 365 applications it gives you access to the online versions of those applications which means you can work and access your documents and files anywhere anytime so if I'm sitting on a train and I want to look at a spreadsheet that I created in Excel back at the office I can log into my online portal for Microsoft

365 and open the document from there whereas With Excel 2021 you don't get access to a subscriber's hub the Microsoft 365 Portal from which you can access lots of other applications and also all of your files so it really is your choice now looking at this table you might think to yourself well Excel 365 sounds like a much better deal and I would say that for most people using Excel these days most people are using the Microsoft 365 subscription service but depending on your situation you may decide that you Would rather just pay outright for

Excel and not have to pay an ongoing monthly subscription fee and speaking of fees let's take a look at the difference so if you go on to the Microsoft website and all I did here was I typed into Google purchase Excel 2021 you can see here the two options that I have the first one is that I can buy Excel outright for 149.99 all of my prices are in pounds because I'm in the UK so these May Differ depending on your location alternatively I can choose to subscribe to Microsoft 365 and get Excel that way

and for me to subscribe it cost me 5.99 per month and I'll be paying that subscription fee every single month so if you wanted to download Excel 2021 all you need to do is come onto this page and click buy now now I will say that this price here of 149.99 is the Microsoft price you can purchase this software for a greatly reduced price From other third-party websites now you always have to be a little bit careful here which ones you choose so I'm going to recommend a site to you and the reason why I'm

recommending this one is because I've purchased many pieces of software from this website and I've never had any problem at all and that website is brightsoft now notice here the difference in price it's currently in dollars but it's only 79.99 and not only do I get Excel 2021 I Get all of the other applications as well so word OneNote PowerPoint Outlook so this is a much better deal and if you look at this price compared to paying for a subscription monthly this is a lot more cost effective however I'll leave it to you to choose

which one you want to download this course is for Excel 2021 but if you have purchased this course maybe at this stage you decide that you would prefer to buy Excel for Office 365 this course is still fine for You to use because Excel 2021 was really released to bring the Standalone versions in line with the features and functionalities currently available in Excel 365 so just bear that in mind if you want to download 365 you can and this course will still will work for you so download Excel make sure you have the course file

saved and let's get to work now that we've downloaded and installed Excel 2021 onto our PC it's time for us to launch the application for the first Time and the way that you do this really does depend on the operating system that you're using so for me I'm using Microsoft's latest version which is Windows 11. but I'm going to Hazard a guess that most people who are watching this course are going to probably be using an older version so possibly Windows 10 maybe even something older now from what I recall from Windows 10 pretty much

everything I'm Going to show you when it comes to launching applications is pretty much the same so the first place that we need to go to here is we need to open up the start menu and the start menu you'll find down on the taskbar and it's this Windows icon just here if you're using Windows 10 you should have something on the taskbar which looks similar to this when you hover over it you're going to get that little screen tip pop up that says start so you Can click to pop that menu up or alternatively

if you're into your keyboard shortcuts you can press the windows logo key on your keyboard now for me this pops open the start menu and what do I have on this start menu well at the top I have a search bar which is going to allow me to search through all of the applications and files that I have on my PC underneath that I have some pinned applications so these might be applications that I use all the time Now if you can't find excel in this pinned area we have an all apps button which is

going to take us into the full list of applications we have available to us and everything in here is organized in alphabetical order so I could scroll through to find Excel or alternatively I can use the search bar at the top simply type in Excel and the best match is the Excel application one click and it's going to let me launch the app now if Excel is going to Be one of the applications that you're using on a regular basis so maybe you go into Excel every single day then I would definitely advise you to

pin Excel either to your taskbar or to your start menu now notice that once I have Excel open if I look down in my taskbar I can see the application on the end here so if I want to pin it to this taskbar permanently so it's available like these other icons I can simply right click my mouse and choose the PIN to taskbar Option now even when I close Excel down that icon is going to remain on the taskbar and I can simply click to relaunch Excel another thing that I can do again from the

start menu so let's press the Windows key to pop that back up again is I could pin it to this pinned area at the top so once again I'm going to jump into all apps let's search for excel this time I'm going to right click and I'm going to say pin to start So now that's going to pin it to that start menu and if you can't see it in this list if you scroll down you might find that it's right at the bottom and of course we can reorganize our pinned icons and applications so

if I want Excel to be further up this list I can click and then just drag it into the position that I want it to be in so let's put this right at the start and then it makes it very simple for me to click Excel and Launch the application from here when you launch Excel it's going to open up by default in something that we call the start screen and you only ever really see this screen in this configuration this exact layout when you launch Excel for the first time so let's take a quick

look around at some of the things that we have on this page now notice over on the left hand side we have three icons home new and open and currently I'm clicked on the home page And we can tell that because it's highlighted in dark green so what do we have on this home page that's going to be useful to us well look at this section at the top called new this is where we can go to create a new blank workbook or maybe select a template and the templates that you can see running across

the top there are ones that I've created so these are my own personal templates and if you cast your eyes over to the right hand side of the screen Just under those templates you can see that there is actually a link to take us to more templates now it's worth noting at this stage that within Excel there are hundreds of office templates that are free for us to use and I'm going to talk to you more about templates and how you use them and even how you create your own in one of the later lessons

but for now just know that if you do need to access the Fuller library of templates you can click on the more templates link From this home screen now underneath our new section we then have a recent and a pinned section now this area really allows you to access files that you've opened and used recently and you'll see underneath the recent list this is basically all of the files that I've been into over the last couple of days you can see the date modified column I've been into most of these files either today or yesterday

now the amount of files that you see listed in Recent is really dependent on what you have set up in Excel options but the default for recent documents is 50. and I'll show you a bit later on how you can modify the number of recent documents you're seeing in your copy of excel so this area is really great if you just want to quickly access something that you've been working on recently now one thing to remember about this particular list is that this is what we call a dynamic list meaning that it's going to Change

all the time so as I open new documents those documents will appear at the top of this list and the ones at the bottom of this recent list are going to kind of fall off the end now if you have a particular document that you want to use all the time so maybe it's something that you go into every single day an update and you want to make sure that it doesn't start moving down this recent list you want to pin it to the top of the list so it's Permanently available well you can do

that so let's take this second document in this recent list the document called lookup functions as I hover my mouse over that file name notice over on the right hand side we get this little pin icon when I hover over it it says pin this item to the list so if I click the pin that item is now pinned in recent and I'm also going to Be able to find it underneath this pinned section and there you go there it is so again this makes it super easy for me to access so that's what we

have on this home page let's jump across to the next icon which is this new icon now this is where you would come to create new workbooks so again we have something very similar to what we had in the new section on the home page this is where we can quickly create a blank workbook or we can access any templates That we've created and once again the ones that I've created and the ones that I use are at the top of this list now if we scroll down this is where we can find ad template

library now notice again that I have two headings office and personal now the office section is where you go if you're looking for a particular template and all of the templates that are available in Excel are categorized so it might be that you're looking for a business template Or maybe something related to planners and trackers maybe you want to create a household budget so you're looking for all of the budget templates notice underneath where we have the search box we have these different categories just here so if I click on budgets it's going to search

through all of the templates in the library and just present me with all of the templates that are related to budgets let's click the back arrow to go back what about if I want to actually search for a template as opposed to looking or browsing through each of these categories well I can click in the search box and maybe I'm looking for an invoice template I can hit enter or I can click on the magnifying glass to kick off that search and there we go we have all of the templates which match the criteria that

I've specified so super simple we're not going to select a template at this stage because we do have an entire lesson on Templates but just for now make sure that you know where you go to access them and I'll also talk a little bit more in that lesson about what this personal section is and how it differs from the office section let's move down and select the next icon so this time open this is where you can come to open any workbooks or folders so if we've created a workbook previously and we've saved it to

a location on our PC maybe to the Documents folder or maybe to a OneDrive cloud storage folder and we want to reopen that this is where we would come so every time you want to open a file come to the open section and this is just showing us a list of different locations that we can open files from So currently I'm clicked on recent and on the right hand side of the screen you can see that I have recent workbook showing currently so again these are the workbooks that I've used most recently If I want

to open any of them it's simply a case of clicking and it's going to load up that workbook in Excel what I also have here is folders so this is going to show me any recent folders that I've saved into so again all of this is here to help us access files quicker underneath recent I have a couple of other storage locations that I have access to so two OneDrive accounts effectively and I can open files from my cloud storage from here and I can also Choose to browse this PC so if I'm more comfortable

going to file explorer and working my way through my folder structure then I can definitely open files from here as well in that way now right at the bottom of this menu we have three little options here account feedback and options so if we click on account this is where you're going to find some useful information related to your account you can see your user information at the top so this is your Login credentials for Microsoft I can choose to change my account photo I can sign out of my account and I can also switch

account from here as well if I do have multiple I can choose an office background from here and also an office theme from here as well so if I wanted to I could change my obvious theme to Black we've also got dark gray white and of course colorful I can see what services I have connected from here as well so in general I usually have OneDrive connected so I can save my files and also a SharePoint site and if I want to add or connect up any new Services I can do that from down here

as well and on the right hand side I just have product information about the version of office that I'm using so you can see here that we are using saying Microsoft Office Professional Plus 2021 this is also where I can come to check to see if we have any updates available for office so very useful to Know where this is underneath the account section we have feedback so this is really if you just want to send some feedback about a particular feature of excel to Microsoft so you can do that if you choose to and

then finally at the bottom we have options this is a really important area and one we're going to dip into and dip out of throughout this course I'm not going to go into this in any great detail at the moment other than to say this is where you come to Customize how your copy of excel works so this is effectively all of your settings you can set up auto save from here you can check what language you're using you can customize your ribbons and even create your own ribbons you can modify the quick access toolbar

and turn off and on different add-ins as well now I've just scratched the surface there with the types of settings that you can change but make sure that you know where Excel options is because we're going to Be coming in and out of here a lot if I click on cancel notice what happens here it doesn't take me back to that start screen and if I click on the file menu I don't get exactly the same screen so I get things that are fairly similar I've got home new and open at the top here but

I have some additional options underneath which weren't part of that start screen now remember I said at the beginning you only ever see the start screen in that Particular layout when you launch Excel for the first time so if I close down Excel one more time and click to reopen it there I get back to my start screen so just remember that so that is the start screen make sure you're familiar with it and you know where to go to create new documents where your templates are and also how to open files and check your

account settings so now that we're comfortable with this Start screen it's time to create a new blank workbook and make ourselves familiar with the Excel interface so I'm on the start screen I'm clicked on home if I want to create a blank workbook I can select blank workbook from here alternatively I can go to new and click on blank workbook from here as well as soon as I click it it's going to load it up into Excel and the first thing you'll notice with Excel 2021 is that we have a lovely shiny new Interface this

definitely has a much more modern look and feel to some of the older versions of Excel for example we now have these curved corners and the icons have been slightly refined so everything just has a much more modern look so now that we have a blank Excel workbook open in the main screen in Excel let's take a look at the interface so we understand what we're looking at so let's start at the top of the screen with this green bar that we can see this Is what we call the title bar and among other things

in this bar you're going to see as you would expect the title of your document now currently I haven't saved this file so the title of this document is really the generic default file name that Excel gives new workbooks and that is normally book one book two book three something along those lines so my file name is currently book one when I save this file this is going to Update and I'm going to see the new name in this title bar now to the left of where we have book one we have a number of

different little icons and this is called the quick access toolbar and again we have an entire lesson dedicated to looking at the quick access toolbar and also customizing it to suit our needs so we're going to come back to that in a later lesson moving across to the middle of this title bar we have a search bar in the middle and notice that There is a keyboard shortcut for this search bar of alt q and from here we can search for pretty much anything moving all the way over to the right hand side this is

where you're going to find your account information again and I can also sign out of my account from here also I then have the minimize button which is going to minimize Excel down into what we used to call the system tray now down into the taskbar now when you minimize it doesn't close Excel Excel is still There it just means you have to hover over the Excel icon in your taskbar and click to maximize that window the button next to that allows us to restore this window down to a smaller size so sometimes if you

want to move this around and see something underneath this window that can be quite useful and if we hover over again I can click to make this full size now if you're wondering what these little pop-up grid structures are when I hover over that button that's Related to a new feature in Windows 11 called Snap layouts it's not actually part of Excel and then right in the corner here we have the close button now a really important thing to note here if you click the cross in the top right hand corner it's going to close

all of excel so if you have multiple workbooks open it's going to close them all because this one closes Excel if you want to close just the file that you have open you would do that from file And you can see that you have a close option in here alternatively there is a keyboard shortcut to close the file that you have open on your screen of control W that's going to close down just the workbook but it's going to leave Excel open so now that we've done that we really need to load up another blank

workbook now a quick way of doing this is again to use a keyboard shortcut so to create a blank workbook control n is going to do that For you now underneath the title bar we have these little tabs at the top here so we have home insert draw page layout formulas so on and so forth and each time I click on one of these tabs it shows me a ribbon and that is the terminology in Excel these are the tabs and each tab has its own ribbon So currently I'm clicked on the home ribbon and

what you see on these ribbons are basically the commands that you're going to use to execute tasks and actions in Excel and these commands are categorized logically on two different ribbons so in General on the home ribbon you're going to find most of the things that you use most frequently so things like cart copy paste format painter you're going to find your formatting options alignment tools number formatting things like that the insert ribbon is where you find all of the things that you can insert into your spreadsheet so things like pictures shapes charts links text

boxes symbols All of that good stuff the draw ribbon is there if you need to make any annotations so this is particularly useful if you work with a touch screen device and a stylus you can ink up your documents make annotations and notes the next ribbon along deals with the layout of the page so from here I can do things like applies specific themes to my workbook and change the margins maybe I want to change the orientation of the workbook From landscape to Portrait I can do things like add a background image turn the grid

lines off and on and also align objects things like that the formulas ribbon is where we go if we want to access our formula library and formulas are really the backbone of excel it's really what it's known for it's calculations so we're going to be doing a lot of work in here a bit later on in the course the data ribbon is where we go to do things like connect to external Data sources so if you want to import data in from other applications you would come into this ribbon we can sort our data we

can filter we can do things like remove duplicates and do various different types of data analysis the review ribbon is generally the ribbon that I come to last so once my spreadsheet has been done I come to the review ribbon because this is where you calm to do things like spell checking you can add comments in and you can also Do things like protect the worksheet and the workbook The View ribbon contains how we're actually viewing our workbook when we're working in it so by default you're always going to be in normal view but you

do have some other views here that you can switch between I can also do things like zoom in and out from here create new windows arrange windows and also switch between any open workbooks now I've got two ribbons turned on here that you might not see in your copy of Excel so the developer ribbon and also the power pivot ribbon are not turned on by default if you want to use these then you need to go into Excel options and toggle these on now the developer ribbon contains a lot of the more advanced commands in

Excel so this is where you would come if you want to work with macros if you want to take a look at the VBA code all things like that and we're not going to touch this ribbon in this Beginner's course so we're going to go in and turn those ribbons off in a moment the final ribbon power pivot this is actually an add-in that I've turned on and again this is one of the more advanced features of excel so for this course you don't need to have that ribbon either so the final ribbon that you

might possibly see and again this is one that isn't always turned on by default is the help ribbon and that is pretty much what it says on the tin this Is where you can come if you need to access the help files so let's quickly jump in to excel options because this will give you a good little introduction to how Excel options works and turn off developer and PowerPoint ribbons because we're not going to be using them so we're going to go to file and all the way down to options now in these categories on

the left hand side I'm going to go to customize ribbon and here I can see all of the ribbons that I have Turned on so I'm going to deselect developer and power pivot just to turn those off and there we go hopefully my Excel now looks more similar to yours now underneath these ribbons we then have something called the name box over on the left hand side which is currently just showing the cell reference of where my cursor currently is now if you're not sure what I mean by cell reference just wait a few minutes

I'm going to explain that to you and then next to the name Box we have the formula bar and this is where you can come to edit your formulas and you can also see what you have in your cells in this formula bar as well and then underneath we have the main part of the workbook and that is the worksheet now each worksheet has a grid structure you can see it's organized by columns that are labeled with letters and rows that are labeled with numbers and all of these rectangles that you can see in this

grid are referred to as Cells and how do we identify different cells in a worksheet well we use what we call the cell reference so take a look at where my mouse is clicked currently notice the column that it's in is shaded in Gray it's in column h and it's also row number eight so the cell reference for this particular cell is h8 and you can see that in the name box just here so wherever I click on this worksheet you're going to see it highlighted in The column and the row and you'll also see

the cell reference in the name box and cell references are so important you're going to be using these all the time particularly when you're doing things like formulas in Excel now at the bottom here I have sheet1 this little tab so we're working in a workbook and we're also working in a worksheet and I can have numerous different worksheets as part of this workbook so that is the structure you have a workbook but that Workbook might contain many different sheets notice that we also have horizontal and vertical scroll bars to help us navigate and scroll

through our worksheets and then finally at the bottom we have the status bar and this status bar is pretty much fairly plain at the moment but you can customize this to show different pieces of information that's going to be useful to you when you're working in Excel way over on the right Hand side we also have quick ways of switching our document views or our worksheet views and we also have a zoom slider which lets us zoom in and zoom out of this particular worksheet now all of these things we're going to go into in

a lot more detail but I just want to give your Whistle Stop tour of the different elements of the screen so that you'll start to become familiar with some of the Excel terminology and where you need to go to access different Options and commands in the previous lesson we started to introduce the concept of tabs and ribbons and in this lesson we're going to take a bit of a deeper dive into tabs and ribbons and we're also going to take a look at menus as well because all of these are really important Concepts to grasp

when you're working in Excel now as we mentioned previously we have our tabs running across the top and each tab has a corresponding ribbon And what we'll find on each of these ribbons are commands that will allow us to execute different actions within Excel and all of these commands have been arranged logically onto their corresponding ribbons to make it a little bit easier for you to find the command that you're looking for example if I wanted to insert a shape into my worksheet The Logical tab to click on would be the insert tab and I'm

going to find shapes within this Illustrations Group which brings me on to my next Point all of the commands on each ribbon are organized into these different groups so if we jump back to the home ribbon once again you can see that for things like cut copy paste format painter those are all part of the clipboard group my font formatting options are part of the font group my alignment tools part of the alignment group so on and so forth now with so many different Commands in Excel if you're fairly new to the application you're probably

going to go through a good few weeks where you're not 100 sure what each of these commands does now fortunately in Excel we have something that can help demystify this for us if I was to hover my mouse over any of these commands on the ribbons notice I get a little screen tip pop up which tells me the name of the command it gives me a short description of what That command does and it's also going to show me if there is a keyboard shortcut for this command now some commands have keyboard shortcuts and some

do not for example if I hover over bold I can see that that one yes that does have a keyboard shortcut but if I hover over let's say increase font size you can see that it's not showing me a keyboard shortcut also what you'll find with these commands is that if you right click your mouse on any of them you're Going to see what we call a contextual menu now contextual menus appear through our Excel and they're called contextual menus because they're kind of contextual to where you're currently clicked so because I've right clicked my

mouse on The Format painter command in that contextual menu I'm seeing menu items related to that particular command so what you see in this contextual menu changes depending on where you're Clicked for example if I was just to click on a cell in the worksheet and right click my mouse I get a much longer completely different contextual menu so this is basically showing me all of the actions that I can take in relation to the cell that I'm clicked on so I can copy this cell I can paste it I can insert new cells I

can delete it so on and so forth another thing you'll notice when you right click on the Worksheet in addition to that contextual menu you're going to see what we call the mini toolbar just above and this mini toolbar contains some formatting commands and these are in general formatting commands that you'll find yourself reaching for all of the time and the idea of this mini toolbar is that it just makes it a little bit easier for you to access these formatting options without having to drag your mouse all the way up to the Home ribbon

now some people love this mini toolbar some people really don't and this is one of those things that you can control within Excel options so let's just divert for a second and let me show you where you can go if you'd like to turn that mini toolbar off or on so we're going to go back up to file into Excel options I told you at the beginning we would be coming out of here fairly frequently now in the general section in this first group where it Says user interface options notice that this second option down

is show mini toolbar on selection so if you don't like that mini toolbar and you find it it just gets in the way when you're right clicking you can deselect this box just here and it's not going to come up when you right click now another place you can go to get access to more commands is by clicking on this little diagonal down arrow in the corner of the group Now notice not every group has one of these diagonal down arrows for example Styles cells and editing don't have them but we have this arrow in

all of these other groups now if I hover over the one for font you can see here it says font settings and this does have a keyboard shortcut of Ctrl shift F so if I click this it's going to open up a little dialog box it's going to jump me straight to the font Tab and in here I have a few Additional options for formatting my font that I don't actually have on the ribbon let's cancel out of there let's click on alignment now notice it takes us to the same box it's still the format

cells box but we've jumped to a different Tab and that is the alignment Tab and again we have a few more controls that we can use to deal with alignment in our worksheet now what about if I click on this one here in the clipboard group let's see what This does now here we get something completely different this opens up the internal clipboard now this clipboard is here to basically collect items that you cut or copy in your worksheet and again I'm not going to go into this in too much detail because we do have

a whole lesson about this later on in the course the main thing I wanted to highlight to you there is that by clicking on that dialog box launcher the little arrow in The corner doesn't necessarily always open a dialog box in this particular scenario it's opened up what we call a pane on the left hand side of the screen and if I want to close down a pane I can just click the cross in the top corner now the final point I'd like to mention here in relation to Ribbons is that you can choose to

hide the ribbon from view by default this ribbon is going to be visible at the top of the workbook all of the time and mostly that's absolutely Fine because you're going to find yourself reaching for your different commands frequently however if maybe you're viewing or scrolling through a very very large worksheet and you want to basically maximize the real estate that you have on the page you could choose to temporarily collapse up the ribbon now there are a couple of different ways that you can do this and by far the easiest way is to use

the keyboard shortcut and the keyboard Shortcut to collapse or expand the ribbons is control F1 you'll notice as soon as I do that I'm just left with those tabs and the ribbons no longer display control F1 again to bring the ribbon back alternatively if I go all the way over to the right hand side notice that I have this little drop down arrow and when I hover over it says ribbon display options so if I click this here I have some Other options when it comes to showing the ribbon now I can choose to always

show the ribbon I can show tabs only which is pretty much what we had when we press Ctrl F1 and notice that once this is collapsed I don't have a little down arrow anymore to bring that back again but what I can do is simply click on one of these tabs and it's going to drop that ribbon back down I can then choose to always show the ribbon and if I want to truly maximize the space that I have On the screen and also get rid of these tabs if I click the drop down I

could choose full screen mode and that's really just going to leave me with the spreadsheet in view to come out of here we can click out three dots in that title bar click the drop down again and switch it back to always show ribbon so far there's one tab at the top here that we haven't really spoken about in any great depth and that is the file tab Now the file tab is different from these other tabs as it doesn't contain a ribbon so when we click on file instead of getting a ribbon it takes

us into what we call the backstage area and this area is a little bit similar to the start screen that we see when we first launch Excel but there are some major differences we have a lot more options that we can select in that left hand menu from file and this backstage area is really what we consider to be the Admin area this is where we can come to create new blank workbooks or even select a template we can open workbooks from here we can save workbooks from here we can also do things like print

workbooks share them with other people export them out to different file formats and even publish them to the power bi service and we're going to be using each of these options throughout this course but just for now know that in order to Get to these options you need to click on file and go into what we call the backstage area now one page here that I do want to draw your attention to is this info page now in info we kind of have two parts to this this is where we can come to do things

like protect our workbook so if we want to add a password to our workbook to protect which parts of the workbook other people can edit we can do that from here we can also inspect our workbook so we Can check for any metadata or information that's stored in the background of each file such as things like the author's name when the document was created things like that we can remove all of those things before we send this out to other people this is also where we can effectively recover any unsaved workbooks so if we're working

away in a workbook and we haven't saved it and Excel crashes we're going to be able to see our unsaved Workbooks listed here and we can effectively recover them and then finally we also have some browser view options so if somebody else was viewing this Excel workbook on the web we can control how they're viewing it and once again we are going to go through all of these options as we go through this course something else we also have in here are the document properties now I haven't saved this document yet so we don't have

Too many document properties it hasn't got a title and it's blank so it doesn't really have any size as yet but we do have a little bit of information about this document I can see when it was last modified when it was created when it was last printed and I can also see that I'm the author and I was the person who last modified this now the only other option that I really want to highlight in this backstage area at this stage is close at the bottom Here if you recall previously when we were working

in our Exxon workberg I mentioned that if you click the cross in the top right hand corner that's basically going to close all of excel so if you've got multiple workbooks open it's going to close them all if you simply want to close the workbook that you currently have open you would choose close from here now it's recognizing that I haven't saved this file and That's fine we don't really need this so I'm going to say don't save that file is going to close down but notice that Excel remains open and remember if I want

to quickly create a new blank workbook again I can use my keyboard shortcut of control n notice the file name at the top is now book three so every time you create a new blank workbook and you don't save it as something else when you create another one it's going to be book three book Four book five so on and so forth so just be aware of that this close in here will close the current workbook the cross in the top corner will close all of excel now if you want to backtrack out of this

backstage area and go back to your Excel workbook you have a couple of different options at the top here just above where it says home we have a back arrow if I click this it's going to take me back to my workbook another way that we can do this is we Can also press the Escape key on our keyboard and that's going to take us back as well so now we're a bit more familiar with the general overall layout of excel it's time to switch our attention to the quick access toolbar and again this is

something I briefly mentioned at the start of this course when we were exploring the Excel interface now for me my quick access toolbar is right at the top here in the left hand corner and It's this tiny little toolbar that has a few little icons on it so where you can see the save command we also have undo and redo this is basically my quick access toolbar and currently I don't have a great deal on there apart from the default commands that display when you enable the quick access toolbar so what exactly is this well

the quick access toolbar or qat as it's known for short is where we can add commands that we use frequently So instead of having to go through and Hunt through different ribbons for commonly used commands we can simply add them to this quick access toolbar which makes them super easy to access now before we start doing that let me show you how you can change the position of the quick access toolbar because currently mine is kind of shoved up in that top left hand corner and when I leave mine up there I tend to forget

that it's even there and I very rarely Use it so I prefer to have mine displaying underneath my ribbons so how do we change the position of the qat well if we hover our Mouse over this little drop down arrow notice that the screen tip says customize quick access toolbar and when I click it it's going to open up a menu of different items and right at the bottom of this menu we have an option to show below ribbon and that's going to move this to underneath your ribbons Now notice that the save icon is

still showing up in this title bar so this save icon isn't actually part of that quick access toolbar you're going to find that this is just part of excel's title bar so the only commands that I currently have on my quick access toolbar are undo and redo now if I click this drop down arrow again you can see that I have a few different commands in this menu that I Can add on to my quick access toolbar with one click and these are really the 15 or so commands that Microsoft have deemed are going to

be useful to you so if I want to add any of these that I can see in this list to my qat I simply need to just select them and it's going to add that command let's also add spelling in here as well now if I want to add save to the quick access toolbar maybe I forget that it's up here in the top left hand corner I Can add another save icon to the qat as well now if you're looking at your Excel and you're thinking well I don't actually see anything that resembles this

quick access toolbar it might be that you don't have it turned on and this is one of the things that's very different from older versions of excel in the last version of excel 365 that I used and in versions before that the quick access toolbar was turned on by default and there was no way for us to Control if we have it toggled on or if we have it toggled off but now in Excel 2021 we do have that option so let me just show you that let's jump up to file and again we're jumping

back into our Excel options now notice in this list we have a home page dedicated to customizing the quick access toolbar I'm going to come back into here in a moment and start adding commands this way but I want to draw your attention first of all to this Bottom section notice I have show quick access toolbar selected if I deselect this box and click on OK it's going to get rid of that quick access toolbar altogether so if you find that you never use it and it's just taking up additional room you can definitely turn

it off now I quite like having my quick access toolbar turned on so let's jump back into there and put a tick in this box Another thing we can do is also display labels for the items on our quick access toolbar so if I select this checkbox as well and click on OK now look at my quick access toolbar instead of just the icons I have the actual labels so it's a lot easier for me to determine what each of these does I can see undo clearly redo clearly email so on and so forth so

now that we've established how to activate the Quick access toolbar and how we can very simply add any of the commands from this customized quick access toolbar menu let's take a look at some other customizations we can make now obviously in this right-click menu we're not seeing all of the commands available in Excel so what if I want to add a completely different command onto my quick access toolbar maybe I'm always using conditional formatting well this is very simple what you can do is right Click on any command on any ribbon and the first option

that you're going to have in that contextual menu is add to quick access toolbar notice as soon as I do that it appears with its label now I mentioned in an earlier lesson that not all commands available in Excel have an icon on the ribbons there are some commands that purely exist in the background and they're usually commands that you don't tend to use all that often so what about If I want to add one of those to my quick access toolbar well this is where we can jump back into Excel options so let's go

to file into options and we're going to go straight to quick access toolbar now over on the right hand side this is where you can see the current quick access toolbar and you can see the icons that I have showing undo redo email spelling save And conditional formatting which is the one I just added and on the left hand side currently I'm showing all of the popular commands in Excel if I want you to see the full list every single command available in Excel I can choose all commands from this first menu and now I

have every single command in Excel available listed out in alphabetical order so I can now go through and I can choose any of these that I want to add so let's Say I want to add add shape after click the add button in the middle and that's going to put that onto the quick access toolbar and I can carry on going through adding different buttons to my quick access toolbar like so and of course if I want to remove them I can do exactly the same thing so I'm actually going to remove these separators and

I'll explain to you what separators are in a moment let's select the first one click remove select the second one click Remove so now that I have all of my quick access toolbar commands showing I can reorganize these using the arrows on the right hand side so maybe I want to move save so it's the first icon on my quick access toolbar I just need to select it and use my arrow keys to move it up so don't be afraid to reorganize your commands on your qat now we just deleted out a couple of separators

there so let me explain to You what separators are separators will effectively separate your commands on your quick access toolbar into groups that you specify and all it really is is a tiny little line it's actually barely visible but it just does give a little bit of structure to the quick access toolbar as opposed to just having a horizontal list of commands so at the top of any list you select whether it's all commands or popular commands you're going to see Separator and you can add in as many separators as you like so I'm going

to add three into here and then I can move these into the correct position so maybe I want to separate save from everything else maybe I want to separate undo and redo from the rest of my commands and then finally let's just move this one up to let's put that just there once you're happy with how you have your q80 organized if we click on OK it's going To update with those changes and I don't know if you can just see very faint line in between these that is the separator so I definitely recommend that

once you've been using Excel for a while you're going to get an idea of the kinds of commands that you use all the time and once you do know that start adding them to your quick access Toolbar to make them super easy to access so you're not digging around the different ribbons looking for your commands it's also Worth noting that if you want to remove commands that you've already added to the quick access toolbar you don't have to keep going into Excel options you can simply right click on the command and then in the contextual

menu you have a remove from quick access toolbar option so I'm actually going to remove the three that I just added in this lesson we're going to run through some of the most useful keyboard shortcuts and we've used quite a few Keyboard shortcuts so far in this course and for me they are the number one thing to learn if you want to improve your efficiency when working in Excel now there are hundreds and hundreds of keyboard shortcuts and you are definitely not going to remember all of them and what I would say is that most

people have 10 to 15 that they use all the time so let me show you some of the most popular ones now if you take a look at My workbook I currently don't have anything open and as we've already seen if we want to create a new blank workbook we can use the keyboard shortcut of control n if I now wanted to save this workbook and bear in mind we haven't really discussed saving in any great detail at the moment we could press Ctrl s and that's going to prompt us to save this file into

a location I'm not going to do that at the moment because we have an entire lesson on Saving let's just click cancel so now let's type something into a cell so I'm just going to pick a random cell somewhere in the middle here H7 is the cell reference and I'm going to type in the number one thousand now what about if I want to format this number well there's a couple of things I can do here the control B keyboard shortcut is going to apply bold formatting if I then choose control I it's going to

apply italic formatting Now notice as I've used these keyboard shortcuts if we take a look up on the home ribbon in the font group notice that now both bold and italic are showing as being toggled on what I could also do is control U that's going to toggle on the underline and if I want to undo the underline the italic and the Bold a very important keyboard shortcut which you're going to use all the time is Ctrl Z that's going to undo your last action so I can go all the way back to How the

number was originally simply by doing control Z three times what about if I want to move this number to a different cell in the worksheet well for that I can use cut and we have a keyboard shortcut for cut of control X notice as soon as I press Ctrl X I now have what we refer to as marching ants or sometimes dancing ants around the outside of the cell and that really just lets me know that I've cut this information now if I was to click the Diagonal Arrow next to clipboard if you remember previously

we looked in here this is where any cut items will be gathered so you can see at the top here because I haven't pasted this yet I've simply cut it it's now being held on this clipboard until I paste it elsewhere okay so now what I can do is click in another cell and use the paste keyboard shortcut which is Ctrl V and that is going to move that number from one cell to Another but what about if I want to make a copy as opposed to cutting it well the keyboard shortcut for copy is

control C again I have my marching ants I can select another cell and I can do paste control V and now I have a copy notice that the original is still showing with marching ants around the outside so I need to press the Escape key to deselect that cell now to demonstrate some more Super useful Keyboard shortcuts we're actually going to open a file that contains more data and there is a keyboard shortcut for open if we press Ctrl o it's going to jump us into that backstage area and straight to the open page and

the file that I want to open I've accessed recently so I'm going to go to my recent list of workbooks and it's this one here so I can just click once to open that file so now we have quite a bit of data in here We can demonstrate some other useful keyboard shortcuts now if I'm clicked in cell A1 where we have the word date and I want to jump down to the last row in this data set I can press Ctrl down arrow and that's going to jump me to the last row if I

want to jump back up to the top control up Arrow if I want to jump to the last column in my data set control right arrow and Ctrl left Arrow to go back what about instead of just moving around I want to actually make a selection I want to select all of the data in column A well for that we can just add in the shift key so Ctrl shift down arrow or select all of the data in that column if I do Ctrl shift right arrow it's going to select everything now another way that

we can select all of the data in this little table here is to press the control a keyboard shortcut Ctrl a is select all and this functions Slightly differently depending on where you're clicked so if you're clicked within some data and you press Ctrl a it's going to basically select all of the data that surrounds where you'll clicked so it's super useful for making very quick selections of tables and data sets but if I was clicked somewhere over here just in a blank cell on this worksheet and I press Ctrl a that's going to select

every single cell in my workbook now a keyboard shortcut that We've already been introduced to is control F1 that is going to minimize up the ribbon Ctrl F1 again to bring it back what about if I want to print this spreadsheet now again we haven't really covered printing yet but this is a very popular keyboard shortcut control p is going to jump us across to that backstage area and into the print page where we can then select our printing options Remember to come out of this backstage area we can press the Escape key so those

are some of the ones that I use all the time now if you're somebody who finds it may be difficult to work with a mouse I know some people who have wrist injuries really struggle working with a mouse and very much prefer to do the majority of their work using the keyboard and if you're one of those people and you want to navigate entirely round Excel using just the keyboard and really cutting down and the amount of times that you're using the mouse this next shortcut is going to be super useful to you if you

press the ALT key on your keyboard notice what happens to my ribbons I get a special shortcut key assigned to all of the tabs the search area the items on my quick access toolbar so on and so forth so maybe I decide that I want to insert a shape Into this worksheet and I know that shapes are on the insert ribbon instead of clicking on insert with my mouse I could use the assigned letter so I can see that that is n if I press n it's going to jump me to that insert ribbon and

I get a whole new set of keyboard shortcuts so I want to go to shapes I can see the key combination there is s h so I'm going to press sh and it's going to drop down that shapes Menu what I can then do is use my arrow keys to move down and select the shape that I want to use so it could be any of these I'm going to go with a rectangle and all I need to do to select this is press the enter key on my keyboard and it's going to insert my

shape if I want to nudge this or move this off of my data set instead of using my mouse to drag it I could use my arrow keys which is going to move this shape along so you can Pretty much navigate and execute actions entirely using your keyboard so don't forget about that alt option now if you find yourself in here and you want to come out of this setting just press alt again to get rid of those letters and finally if you're really interested in keyboard shortcuts and you'd like to know the full comprehensive

list of all of them available in Excel and as I said there are hundreds then your best bet is to go to the help file and this in Itself has a keyboard shortcut so if we press the f one key this is going to pop open Excel help and again we do have an entire lesson on how to access help but just to show you if we just type in keyboard shortcuts and hit enter it's going to search the help files the top option here will show us all of the keyboard shortcuts available in Excel

so if I click this it's going to open up This little Pane and if I scroll down the keyboard shortcuts are divided down into different topics so if I go to frequently used shortcuts I'm going to see what all of those are so some of these we've already used close a workbook control W open control o save Ctrl s cut copy paste undo that one that you're going to be using all the time so this is a great little reference guide if you are super keen on using Shortcuts as opposed to using your mouse to

click on commands to finish off this introductory section I just want to make sure you know where to go if you ever need help when you're working in Excel because let's face it we all need a little bit of help sometimes it might be that you're not sure what a particular command does or maybe you know the command that you want to use but you don't know which ribbon it's Located on or maybe you just want to do some additional reading about a command so that you know if it's going to be fit for purpose

and there are a few different ways that we can get help in Excel now two of them we've already kind of had a little look at the most basic way to get some help is by hovering over any of the commands in this ribbon these screen tips in themselves are help if you just want to Know what a command does the screen tips are going to show you this information for example I'm hovered over merge and center I can see underneath a short description and it tells me that if I click this button it's going

to combine and center the contents of the selected cells in a new larger cell this is a great way to create a label that spans multiple columns if I want any more information if I want a bit more detail notice that I have This little tell me more Link at the bottom if I click this it's going to jump straight into the Excel help files and to the exact place in these help files that I need so now I get help on merge and unmerge cells and notice in here I have a little tutorial video

that I can play and then underneath I have some instructional text that walks me through the process step by step of how to merge cells and also unmerge cells so these Screen tips are a really great way to get a quick look at what it does and if you need more information you have the tell me more Link at the bottom and you'll notice that you have this for all of these commands conditional formatting I have a tell me more link if I go to font color I have a tell me more link so a

really nice way of getting to help now these help files can also be accessed by pressing the F1 key on your keyboard and if you have the help ribbon showing At the top notice that the First Command on here is basically what you get when you press the F1 key it's exactly the same thing we do have some other options on this help ribbon as well so if you're in the US you might want to use this contact support option now I'm in the UK and unfortunately this feature isn't supported if you're outside the US

we have a feedback section so this is where we can provide some feedback to Microsoft maybe about features that we Think could be improved we have a show training section so this is super useful if you're looking for a little bit of training in the form of video files you can come into here and you can search for what it is that you're looking for so maybe I want to find a video but it's going to show me how to format a table I can click on the link to format an Excel table and we'll

say there isn't a video for everything that you search for but At the very least you will get step-by-step instructions now we also have a group here called community and these are going to take you to external websites so if we click on the community command it's going to open up a web browser and jump me straight across to the Microsoft Excel community and this is where I can come to get some really good information I can become a member I can start discussions so if I have a particular issue I could post it here

And get help from the Excel community so a really nice little option there I could choose Excel blog again this is going to jump me across to the Microsoft web page and to the blog specifically about Excel and blog posts are posted here on a frequent basis and it's a great place to come if you're interested in keeping up to date with new things in Excel and you're somebody who enjoys reading blog posts and then finally we have these suggest a feature button Which again allows you to make some suggestions to Microsoft now aside from

all of these options for help we have a couple of other options now notice at the top of the screen we have a search bar now if you'll click somewhere down here on your Excel spreadsheet and you want to quickly jump up to that search area notice the keyboard shortcut alt Q it's going to pull your cursor up to the top so what I can do here is I can search For something in Excel so maybe I want to know how to format a table again and what this will do is it will find if

what I've typed is a command that exists in Excel so format as a table is an actual command and it's listed up here and it basically jumps me straight to the command that I need it also gives me some other selections that are similar to what I've typed it's also going to show me any Excel files I have that Contain the words format a table and if I want to get some help on this I can also get help from here simply by clicking get help on format a table and it's going to pop open

that help area again now the final way that you can get help is what we call contextual help so let me show you an example if I click the diagonal arrow in the bottom corner of this font group notice that in this format cells dialog box I have a little question mark icon I have a question Mark symbol and if I hover my mouse over this symbol it says help and what this does is it provides contextual help so because I'm in the format cells dialog box clicked on the font tab when I click on

help from here it's going to find me help related to the font dialog box which is where I currently am so that option is a great way of getting contextual help notice that if I do the same thing in this alignment Group which is basically The format cells dialog box again we're just on a different tab if I click the question mark this time it's going to open up a web page and take me to the correct page of help information so those are all of the ways that you can obtain help when you're working

in Excel foreign it's now time for us to do our first exercise of the course exercise one and in this exercise I'd like you to practice the skills that you've learned in this section so first I would like You to launch Excel and I would also like you to pin Excel to the taskbar to make it easy to access once you've done that I would like you to customize the quick access toolbar and add the following three commands autosum wrap text and fill I'd then like you to add a separator to the quick access toolbar

and then the final thing I'd like you to do is to practice creating a blank workbook using the keyboard shortcut see how you get along with that and if you'd Like to see my answer then please keep watching so the first thing we need to do here is we need to launch Excel and then pin it to the taskbar now I'm using Windows 11 so I'm going to jump down to my search type in Excel there it is in the list I'm going to right click on the application and choose to pin to taskbar now

that I have it pinned to the taskbar I can simply click on the icon to launch Excel the next thing I asked you to do Was to customize the quick access toolbar and add the commands Auto sum wrap text and fill so let's jump across to the formulas tab find autosum right click add to quick access toolbar let's go to home find wrap text right click add to quick access toolbar and the final one is also on the home ribbon right click add to quick access toolbar I then asked you to add a separator to

the commands on the qat and I don't really mind where you place this Separator but to do this you need to go into file into options and quick access toolbar and from here we're going to select the separator at the top and click add and then we can move it into position using our up and down arrows and the final thing I asked you to do in this exercise is to create a blank workbook using the keyboard shortcut so all we need to do here is press Ctrl n Sometimes it can be a little bit

daunting if you're asked to put together a spreadsheet from scratch if you're faced with just a blank workbook and your manager asks you to create a budget spreadsheet or maybe something like an invoice you might not really know where to start and that is where templates can be your best friend a template is simply a pre-built spreadsheet it contains formatting formulas and lots of other items and the Great thing about Excel is that we have a whole host of inbuilt templates that we can use for free so if we want to find our templates let's

jump up to the file menu to go into that backstage area and let's jump down to new now if we scroll down to the lower half of this page notice we have a tab at the top that says office and one that says personal now I'm going to get into what personal Is in a moment let's now concentrate on this office section this is where you're going to find all of your templates and all of the templates in Excel are organized into different categories to make them easier for you to find and you'll notice just

under that search bar at the top where it says search for online templates we have some suggested search categories so for example if I was looking for some kind of budget template I could click on The budgets link just here it's going to search through all of the inbuilt templates in Excel and just present me with the ones that are related to budgets and you can see in there we can go through and take a look for the one that most suits our needs for example I have some monthly company budget templates we have a

wedding expense budget College budget holiday planner budget so on and so forth let's click the back arrow to go back to the Main template page what I can also do is I can search for templates as well using the search bar at the top so maybe I need to create an invoice I don't want to do it from scratch so I'm going to search to see if Excel has any invoice templates that I can use and you can see that yes we do we have quite a few in here so once you find a template

that you want to use and I think I'm just going to choose this Simple invoice template let's click it once it opens up a little window that gives me a little bit of information about this template it also tells me who is providing this template in this case Microsoft and I also get to see the download size as well and I can check in that preview to make sure that this is the template that I want to select notice that I have arrows either side so if I want to scroll through and take a look

at some other templates I can Definitely do that as well now I'm pretty happy with this template so I'm just going to click the big old green create button in the middle there and that is going to load up that template into the main window of excel now one thing to notice here is if you look up in that title bar you can see that it just says simple invoice one and that is the name of this actual template and the cool thing about these templates is that they are reusable So if I was to

come into here and make some changes so maybe I need to change the company name let's just change that to it train now if I try and save this template it's going to ask me to save it under a new file name so effectively I can't overwrite this template which means that if I want to reuse this I can just go into file new and reselect it again now all of the elements of these templates can be customized so if you Don't particularly like the colors that are in use here you can change things like

that by simply using your formatting tools at the top also notice that all of these fields are editable I can just double click in them if I want to add information and also notice that I have some formulas included in this template as well so if I click on Cell G9 if you take a look up in the formula bar you can see there's already a formula in that cell and what This is basically going to do is when I start adding in line items it's automatically going to calculate so if I add in the

line item let's just add something in I'm going to put in webinar we've got one the unit price is 250 and there's no discount notice that it automatically totals for me so by using this template I've saved so much time because it means that I don't have to hash out the main structure of this invoice myself I don't have to add Formulas I don't have to add formatting now once I've finished editing this I have two options when it comes to saving I'm going to talk a bit more about this when we get into the

lesson related to saving but I could choose just to save this as a regular Excel workbook or I could choose to save this as a template file and in fact I can save any workbook that I create as a template file if I want to so maybe let's delete out what we've added in here Maybe I make some changes to this template so let's just change the background fill at the top here I'm going to change that to this dark red color maybe I've made some other changes maybe I've added my company logo something like

that and now maybe going forward I always want to use this template which I've now customized a little bit instead of starting from the blank invoice template every single time So if I want to use my customize template I would need to save this as a template file so if I jump up to file and go down to save as I'm going to browse for a location to save this in and for the time being I'm just going to save this on my desktop but what I need to do here is I need to give

it a name so maybe I want to call this train it now invoice Template but I need to change the type of file that I'm saving it as so instead of just saving it as a regular Excel worksheet I want to save this as a template file and you'll see if we click the drop down just here we have this file type dot xltx which is an Excel template file now notice that as soon as I change this save as file type it jumps me to an entirely different folder if you remember I had selected

my desktop to Save this too as soon as I change this I am now in the custom office templates folder and this is the default folder where Microsoft saves any templates that you create now you could choose to override this and go back and save it to whichever folder you prefer but there is one big advantage of saving it into the default folder so let's click on Save I can now see that that file name has changed and I'm Going to close down this template and for this I'm going to use the keyboard shortcuts Ctrl

W now if I want to reuse that template if I go to file and down to new this is what this personal section is for at the bottom so when you save a template into the default templates folder it's going to save it to personal in here and it just means that any template that you create you can access very quickly from this personal section and you can see there Is my template on the end here train it now invoice template if I'd chosen to save this template to my desktop as opposed to in the

custom templates folder I wouldn't be able to select it from this personal section so I'll leave that up to you to determine if you want to save it in here or if you have a specific folder that you'd like to save your templates into but just be aware of that distinction because saving it into personal makes it So much easier to access let's just click to open this again it's now opened my template with my customizations I can update this file maybe for a new client and then I could choose to just save this as

a regular Excel file if I need to send that to the client and then reuse my template again for the next client so templates are definitely worth checking out if you want to get a head start on spreadsheet creation As I mentioned previously every workbook in Excel can contain numerous different worksheets and you can have up to 255 worksheets per workbook so that is a lot of data so you have the potential to have a lot of data stored within each workbook the workbook is the overall container that houses the worksheets so if we take

a look at my workbook this workbook is currently unsaved but the workbook is called book one and currently I have one worksheet in this Workbook called sheet1 and you can see that as a tab at the bottom of the screen and it's fundamental to your understanding of basic Excel to know how to work with your worksheets so let's take a look at some of the basic things that are important to know each worksheet in your workbook contains a grid structure of what we call cells each workbook contains columns represented by letters and rows represented by

numbers And these rows and columns where they intersect we have what we refer to as cells and it's in these cells where we type all of our information and each cell can contain numerous different types of data it might be that we're typing text into a cell or it could be that we're typing numbers into a cell we can type things like percentages into cells or even dates and everything you type into a cell in a worksheet can be formatted so that it looks exactly as You want it to look and as we already know

we identify different cells in a worksheet by using the cell reference so where the column and the row intersect we get our cell reference so currently I'm clicked on Cell G5 and it's these cell references that are used consistently throughout Excel when we're building things like formulas and pretty much when we're doing anything in Excel it already relates to the cell reference now when it comes to your different Worksheets you'll notice that when you create a new blank workbook in Excel you're just going to get a default worksheet that's called sheet1 and each worksheet contains

over 1 million rows if I click in cell A1 and press Ctrl down arrow that's going to jump me down to the very last row in this workbook so you can see there just over a million control up Arrow to jump to the Top If I do control right arrow it's going to jump me to the last column and there are Just over sixteen thousand columns in one worksheet Ctrl left Arrow to jump back to cell A1 so what that means is that within each worksheet we have roughly 17 billion cells and we have the

potential to fill all of those with data now this is not something I would advise when you start getting into spreadsheets that are that large you're probably going to find X Excel starts to slow down greatly but just but just be aware of the potential amount of data that you Can squeeze into every worksheet now what about managing different worksheets well again if we go down to the bottom where we have sheet1 this isn't a particularly meaningful name it's rather generic so what I would probably do here is immediately rename this worksheet to make it

a little bit more meaningful depending on what I have on this worksheet now I don't have anything at the moment but let me just show you how You can rename your worksheets if you right click on the tab it's going to pull up that contextual menu and we have a number of different worksheet related menu items in here and one of them is rename you can now see sheet1 is highlighted and I can just go in and call it something else it's also worth noting that to rename you can simply double click on the tab

and it will let you rename that way as well let's right Click again and take a look at some of these other options now if I want to insert another worksheet in this workbook I have an insert option just here it's going to ask me what I want to insert the first option that's highlighted is worksheets so I'm just going to click on OK and now I get a brand new worksheet now a much quicker way of doing exactly the same thing is simply to click on the plus just here so when I click on

plus I get Yet another worksheet and once again I can right click and I can rename so let's call this one calculations let's right click and call this one tables and hit enter if I want to reorder my worksheet so maybe summary needs to be the first worksheet in this workbook I can simply drag and drop so let's click on summary drag it over notice I get that little down facing Black Arrow which is going to show me where this tab will be placed when I let Go of my mouse let's let go to reorganize

those tabs let's right click again I have a move or copy option in here so from here what I could do is I could choose to move or copy this particular worksheet to a completely different workbook that I have open now I don't currently have another workbook open I just have book one but if I was to select new book and click OK it's going to move the summary tab to a brand new Excel workbook if I Want to create a copy as opposed to moving it I would need to make sure I select create

a copy if I click on ok now what you'll see is that I now have a new book at the top Book 2 which contains that summary tab now I don't need this so I'm going to do Ctrl W to close this down let's right click one more time and on the subject of moving and copying if I want to make a copy of a worksheet within the same workbook I can simply hold down my control okay Drag and drop and it's going to make an exact copy of that worksheet and it will copy across

all of the data contained on that worksheet as well and of course we can right click and delete any worksheets that we no longer need another cool thing to do is to change the tab color of the different worksheets and essentially color code your workbook this is particularly useful if you are working on a large project where you have numerous Different tabs grouping them together using colors is a really nice visual way of adding some structure to your worksheet and letting people know that these Tabs are related so if we right click we have tab

color just here I can choose Green from the palette and maybe tables and calculations are related but summary isn't so maybe I want to make the other two tabs exactly the same blue color and one final little tip before we move on if you're interested in knowing The keyboard shortcut to quick quickly insert a new tab it is shift F 11. let's move this by dragging and dropping I'm going to right click and change the color to blue and then I'm going to rename this to Pivot and hit enter so far in this course we've

been working away inside different workbooks but I haven't yet shown you how to save your workbooks so let's take a look at that now now most of us are familiar with saving documents and spreadsheets and I Will say that if you're used to saving documents in other Microsoft applications such as word and PowerPoint then this is pretty much exactly the same now there are a few different methods that you can use when it comes to saving workbooks in Excel 2021 and there is a fundamental difference between Excel for Microsoft 365 and the new Excel 2021

version if you're used to using Microsoft 365 or specifically Excel in Microsoft 365 you may have Noticed that in the quick access toolbar there is an auto save slider and basically what this means is that as you work away in your worksheets Excel is constantly saving your workbook and the cool thing about that is that it means you are very unlikely to lose any work if Excel was to unexpect expectedly crash now in Excel 2021 because this is a standalone version and not a cloud version we don't have the auto save toggle so this means

that you need to Save your document or your workbook as you're working now of course we do have some backup to that there are auto save capabilities within Excel 2021 which I'll show you in a moment but just be aware of that fundamental difference if you are coming to this course after using Microsoft 365. now when it comes to saving you have a few different options we have a save button on the quick access toolbar and you can see as I hover over that you Can also see the shortcut key for Save which is control

s and that is probably the quickest way to save your workbook as you're working I know that for me I am now in the habit of periodically sort of every five minutes or so just quickly doing Ctrl s to make sure that everything that I'm doing is saved also notice we have a save icon up in that title bar and if we go to the file tab to jump into that backstage area we also have save and save as in here Now what is the difference between these two well you would use save as if

this is the first time that you're saving your workbook so if you create a new blank workbook as we have done here it's going to be assigned to the generic name of book one book two book three so on and so forth so effectively when I save this I'm going to be saving it for the first time so I would need to do file save as now the thing is here that if I was just To press Ctrl s to save it's going to basically ask me to save as anyway the same thing is going

to happen if I go to file and down to save as opposed to save as it's going to jump me across to the save as tab anyway because it's the first time I'm saving so now from here I can browse to a location where I want to save this file now I'm going to save all of my course files on my desktop and I would recommend that for the purpose of this Course you find a location like your desktop or maybe even my documents create yourself a little folder and call it something along the lines

of course files just so you have somewhere to save all of these files that we're creating during this course so I've created a brand new little folder let's double click to open it up and now I can give my file a name now when it comes to naming files a lot of people like to use some kind of naming convention and it Might be that within your business you have a standard way that you name files for example if you're saving an invoice you might start all file names with imv and then maybe the date

and then the invoice number something like that now for this first file because it is our first one I'm just going to call it my first workbook Now by default if you want to save an Excel file the file extension is Dot xlsx and you can see that underneath That is the default file extension that it's giving me and basically the main point of file extensions is really to help identify what type of file this is for example if I'm in file explorer and I double click to open a file with the file extension.xlsx file

explorer knows that that's an Excel file and it needs to launch Excel now in this save as type if we click you can see that we have so many different file types that we can Save our workbooks as and we will dip in and out of some of these as we go through the course in fact in the last lesson we briefly took a look at saving files as Excel templates but for the time being we just want to save this as a regular default Excel file so let's just click on the save button now

as soon as I do that it jumps me back to my workbook and you can now see in the title bar it's updated to say my first workbook so now I can go in and I can start to work so maybe I'm just typing some numbers into this workbook and if I want to save as I go along I can press Ctrl s keyboard shortcut or I can click the save button on the quick access toolbar now what about if I've been working for two to three hours and I've just completely forgotten to save if

that does happen I have the potential to lose quite a lot of work if I accidentally close down Excel or maybe it unexpectedly crashes so to help with This we have some auto save options that we should be reviewing before we really start working in Excel and we'll find those options underneath the file Tab and if we go all the way down to options at the bottom notice in here we have a page specifically related to saving Excel workbooks now it's this section just here that you want to double check I can see here that

I'm saving files by default in the standard Excel format Which is perfect and then underneath I have this little check box selected save Auto recover information every and then I have mine set to five minutes that you could choose to take this down to one minute two minute or even take it up to 10 minutes 15 minutes but that basically means that if Excel does crash and you haven't saved it you're really only going to lose up to five minutes of work because Excel is going to auto save every five minutes also note that I

have Checked underneath keep the last Auto recovered version if I close without saving so what does that exactly mean well let's click on OK I'm going to make a few further changes to this workbook I'm just going to add some numbers in here and I'm not going to save but I'm going to just close this workbook now notice it says want to save your changes to myfirstwork.xlsx So it's recognized that I have unsaved changes and has prompted me to save so I can now choose to save or don't save now I'm going to click cancel

here now sometimes if Excel crashes it's not going to pop up that message but because we've chosen to Auto recover the next time we open Excel we're going to get a message at the top saying that files have been Auto recovered and we're going to get the chance to restore them and in that scenario what I could also do is go To file into info and underneath this manage workbook area I have an option to recover unsaved workbooks so this is going to pop me to a folder where any unsaved files are stored and you

can see that I have one in here so this is one I was working on yesterday I think and my laptop actually ran out of power and just closed itself down so you can see that Excel has actually recovered that book just there if I want To reopen that I can just by clicking the open button so the main takeaways here are the different methods you can use to save your file how you can save as into a folder and also how you can review your auto save and auto recover options all different types of

data can be entered into cells in an Excel worksheet we can enter text we can enter numbers decimal numbers percentages formulas and many other data types so let's take a Look at some of the basic things you need to know when it comes to entering and editing data in cells So currently I am in my first workbook and I'm clicked on the calculations tab now what I'm going to do is I'm going to jump up to cell B3 and I'm going to type in the word months so to type into a cell simply select the

cell and start typing now notice as I type into the cell the word that I've typed also appears in the Formula bar so anytime you click on a cell that contains numbers or text you're going to see the contents of that cell also reflected in the formula bar and you could in fact if we just backspace out of here if I wanted to use the formula bar instead of typing into the cell I could click up in the formula bar type the same thing and it's going to enter it into the cell now one thing

to note here is once You've finished typing in your piece of data into the cell you have a couple of different options if I press the enter key the cursor is going to move down to the cell below ready for me to type in my next piece of data now if I type into a cell and I want to stay in the same cell I can press Ctrl enter and it's going to leave my cursor there and that's particularly useful in many many different scenarios if I want to type something in the cell To the

right of where I've typed Jan I can simply press the tab key or I could use my mouse to click on the cell I can also use my arrow keys to navigate horizontally and vertically in a spreadsheet now that I have Jan in here underneath the heading months what I effectively want to do is I want to list out all of the months of the year so what I could do I guess is go through and just type them all in there aren't that many so it's not going to take too Long but we have

a special little tool in Excel which recognizes certain standard patterns so things like months of the year and days of the week if I just delete out and I'm just highlighting both of those cells and pressing the delete key on my keyboard what I could do is use my autofill handle to fill the rest of these months into the worksheet now the autofill handle is this tiny little solid green Square in the bottom right hand corner Of the cell if I hover my mouse over it you can see that it changes to a small black

cross so what I can do now is click and start to drag down and notice the screen tip it's telling me what it's going to fill into the cell when I let go so I can drag this all the way down to December let go and I haven't had to type those in Excel has done all the hard work for me so Excel recognizes certain patterns If I go to cell C3 and type in days and hit enter and now type in Monday this would be a good example of when I want to stay in

the same cell because I want to use that little autofill handle again Ctrl enter to stay in the cell and then I can drag down and complete the days of the week so a really nice quick way to get that information into a spreadsheet we could also do this with things like dates so if you need to type in lots of dates let's just say the first of the First 2021 I'm going to do control enter to stay in the cell and if I drag down you can see it goes up by different days and

just a quick point to note here for all of our American viewers I'm actually using the British format for my dates we do switch around the day and the month so if that's confusing you a little bit that is why now what about if I type in something like let's say week number now the first thing to note here is that week number kind of breaches the Boundaries of column e you can see it looks like it's spinning across into column f well in fact it actually is all contained within cell E3 but it's too

wide for the current width of the cell so in this type of scenario you're going to probably want to resize the width of column e to accommodate the full length of the text and there's a very quick way that we can do this if we hover our Mouse over the Boundary between column e and column F and double click that's going to auto fit that column to the width of the longest item in the column and that is a really useful little trick you can also apply that trick to multiple columns so if I select

all of these columns again I can double click and it's going to resize or auto fit those columns now what about if I type in numbers well if I start to type in 1 2 3 I could carry on going but again I could use my auto Fill to make this even more useful so what I could do here is select all of those numbers carry on dragging down and you can see that it's going to fill in the rest of them for me and a bit later on in this course when we talk about

autofill I'm going to show you an even quicker way to fill in lots of different numbers so if you need to type into a Excel spreadsheet numbers one to ten thousand there is a very quick way of doing that and what about if I want to Go back and edit cells so maybe I want to change where it says Jan to January well again there's a couple of different ways that I can do this I can click on the cell and double click my mouse and that's going to put me in edit mode and I

can now just go in and change that to January and hit enter and for this I think I'm probably going to want to widen out this column and I can actually drag this and customize how wide I have that column another way that I can edit cells is to press the F2 key on my keyboard which again puts me into edit mode and I can simply jump in there and edit the third way I can edit is to go up to the formula bar and make any changes I need to from up there as well

and now that I have these all in Long format I'm going to select them all and re-drag down and it's going to switch or autofill the rest of those long format months now other common ways for getting data into your worksheet is to import Data from other worksheets or other sources you can even import things from word or PowerPoint if you wanted to using copy and paste and you can even copy and paste things from one part of your workbook to another part of your workbook so for example if I now wanted this little column

of data here where we have the months if I wanted to copy that and paste it over here in column l i can simply do that using copy and paste So I'm going to select all of these months up on the home ribbon you can see in the clipboard group we have options for cut copy and paste and all three of these have keyboard shortcuts Ctrl X control C and then control V so it's up to you which method you use and the difference between cut and copy is that cut will move and copy will

copy so I'm going to click copy notice that as soon as I click that cell range now Has those marching ants around the outside to show that I've selected and I'm about to copy I can then click in cell L3 and I can click the paste button to paste that information in remember if you want to deactivate this selection that you've made just press the Escape key now can't copy and paste Works across the Microsoft applications so if I have something in word that I want to bring into Excel I can do that By using

copy and paste as well so here I just have Hello World in a Word document I can select it I can use the same tools on the Home tab I can copy let's go back to excel I can choose a cell and then I can simply click the paste button to paste that text in and of course if I want to I can reformat this so it matches the font of everything else in my workbook So currently I can see that this is calibri font and the rest of my workbook is in Aerial so I

can simply go in and also change this to Aerial now the final thing that's worth noting here is that if you're going to use the formula bar to enter data in so for example if I select let's select cell C4 if I want to change this to Monday I can do that up in the formula bar and I can simply type in Monday notice that I also have a little tick and a cross next to the formula bar and the tick is basically the same as Pressing the enter key if I decide I want to

cancel and just go back to the word mun I could click on the cross to cancel so in this case I'm happy with this let's click the tick which is basically the same as clicking enter and I'm now going to drag down to change all of those to the long version of the day another important thing to know when you're learning Excel is how you can Make different selections in your worksheet now for this example we're going to switch to another workbook that contains a lot more data now before we do that let's just very

quickly give my first workbook a save so I'm going to press Ctrl s just save those changes so now what we're going to do is we're going to flip across to a larger data set that contains sales data and you'll find this file saved in the course files folder now notice here this Is standard sales data we have some column headings running across the top and then we have our data and this data set is reasonably large at least a lot larger than the ones that we've been working on in previous lessons and if I

press Ctrl down arrow as we know that jumps us to the last row of our data you can see that I have just over 21 and a half thousand rows control up arrow is going to jump me to the top also remember when it comes to navigating if I press Ctrl right arrow it's going to jump me to the last column of data and control right arrow or jump me to the First Column now there are lots of different ways that you can make Selections in Excel and a basic cell selection would be simply clicking

on a cell in our worksheet if we want to select more than one cell we can simply click and drag our Mouse to select the cell range that we're interested in so maybe I want to apply Some formatting to the column headings in this worksheet I can make my selection just by clicking and dragging and then I can go up to my font formatting area I'm going to click the font color drop down and I'm going to change this to a red font so cell selections are very straightforward simply click drag to make your selection

now notice here all of the selections that I've been making using this method are cells that are all next to each Other what about if I want to select what we call non-contiguous cells the cells that aren't next to each other or what I could do here is select the first few cells hold down my control key and then make another selection hold down my control key again and make another selection and just keep doing that so the addition of the control key when you're selecting cells will allow you to select cells which aren't necessarily

next to each other and if I Wanted to apply formatting to all of these cells for example bold I can simply click bold and I get the effect that I want now I don't want these to be in bold so let's just toggle our bold back off now what about if I want to make a selection in my worksheet of an entire column of data so for example in column H where we have some sales figures I have some numbers they're currently unformatted as in they don't have any currency symbols Or decimal places or anything

like that what about if I want to change the format of all of the sales figures in here do I really want to be clicking and dragging my mouse down 27 000 rows in order to select this cell range well no not really it's not the most time efficient way to do this what I could do instead is click in the first cell H2 and press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl shift down arrow and that's going to select every cell Downwards that I have in my data set now that I've made that selection I can simply

go in and apply some currency formatting and we haven't really spoken a great deal about number formatting so far in this course so I am going to jump ahead very slightly here so just above in this number group I can click the drop down and I'm going to say that I want this formatted as a currency and you can see how that affects those numbers So don't forget that very useful keyboard shortcut of Ctrl shift down arrow to make a selection of all of the data in the column now so far we've been very much

focused on making cell selections but cell selections aren't the only things that we can select when we're working in Excel example maybe I want to make a column selection or maybe I want to select an entire row so this is very straightforward if I want to select a Column I can simply hover my mouse over the top of the column where we have the letter notice that I get a little black downward facing arrow and if I click that is going to select the entire column and I mean it's going to select the entire column

as in it's going to select every single cell in that column all the way down to the bottom of the workbook if I want to select multiple columns again I can simply drag my mouse across to make multiple selections if I Want to select columns that aren't next to each other again I just add in that control key when I click and the same works for making row selections I can hover my mouse over the row until I get the right pointing Black Arrow I can click to select one row I can click and drag

to select multiple rows or I can add in that control key to select non-contiguous rows it's also worth noting that you can make selections just using your keyboard So if I'm clicking cell A2 and I want to select all of the data in this particular row if I hold down shift and then use my arrow keys it's going to allow me to select that data if I keep shift held down and use my down arrow key it's going to go down the rows I can use my up Arrow to refine my selection further and then

the final thing that's worth pointing out about making selections is select all and select all functions differently depending on where You're clicked in your worksheet so if I'm clicked within my data and I press Ctrl a which is the keyboard shortcut for select all it's going to select all of the data that it finds surrounding where I'm currently clicked now if I was clicked on a blank cell somewhere else in the worksheet so not within my actual data and I press Ctrl a it's going to select every single cell in my worksheet now I find

myself using Ctrl a with inside my data all the time If I want to format this data as a table or maybe I want to add Borders or something like that I'll find myself making this selection and then from there I can go up and maybe add a border around the outside of every single cell it just makes this entire process a lot quicker so that is how you can make basic cell row and column selections when you're working in your worksheets so guys it's time for exercise two and in this exercise we're going to

practice The skills that we've learned in this section so the first thing I'd like you to do is create a template so I'd like you to search for the keyword invoice in the template Library I'd like you to open one of the invoice templates and I'll leave it up to you to decide which one you want to open and I'd like you to save it as invoice template with the correct template file extension and I want you to make sure that you Save it to the default templates folder once you've done that I'd like you

to create a new blank workbook I'd like you to rename sheet1 to summary and then add three more worksheets and then rename each of those worksheets to sales data calculations and charts next we're going to practice entering data into our worksheets so on the sales data worksheet in cell A1 I'd like you to type in a title that says sales data for 2020 I'd like you to format that title So make sure that the font size is 14 points and it's in bold then in cells A3 to C3 I'd like you to enter the headings

month revenue and profit and then in cell A4 enter the word Jan I'd then like you to use the fill handle to copy down the months February and March and then finally I'd just like you to add some values from revenue and profit like I have in the screenshot and then the final thing we need to do for this Exercise is simply save this Excel workbook so I'd like you to create a folder on your desktop and name it Excel practice files and then save the workbook as exercise zero to practice that's it guys if

you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching so the first thing we need to do here is search for an invoice template in the template Library so let's go to file and down to New I'm going to scroll down to my templates and in the search box I'm going to type in invoice and hit enter now I didn't mind which one of these you chose so I'm just going to choose this first one just here let's double click to open it up and load it into Excel next I asked you to save this

as a template file into the default templates folder so we're going to say file save as let's click on browse and remember we need to change the save as Type 2 and Excel template now that is automatically going to jump us across to the correct folder and I'm just going to call this invoice underscore template and click on Save next I asked you to create a brand new blank workbook so Ctrl n to do that we're going to rename sheet1 to summary so we can double click and type in the word summary I then asked

you to add three more sheets so let's click the plus once twice Three times and then rename these worksheets two sales data calculations and the final one is going to be charts [Music] we're then going to switch to the sales data Tab and in cell A1 we're going to add a title so this is sales data for 2020. we're going to format this font so that it is 14 points and also bold and then in cells A3 to C3 we're going to Type in some headings month Revenue and profit and then underneath we're going to

type the word Jan control enter to stay in the same cell and I'm going to use my autofill handle just to fill down February and March I then asked you just to enter some numbers into the revenue and profit fields and again I don't really mind what numbers you entered in here and just to finish this off I'm going to Give these headings a bit of bold formatting and we're also going to apply a background fill next I asked you to create a folder on your desktop and call it Excel practice files so all we

need to do here is right click our Mouse go to new and folder we'll call this Excel practice files and hit enter and then we're going to save this file into that folder so let's go to browse to our desktop and open up that new Folder and we're going to call this exercise zero two underscore practice and click on the save button it's now time for us to move on and concentrate on the exciting part of Excel and that is formulas and functions formulas are really what Excel is most known for and all formulas are

if you're not familiar with them are basically calculations and the most simple example Of the type of formula that you can do in Excel is a sum calculation and what I mean by that is just simply adding up a list of numbers in a worksheet now before we get too far ahead of ourselves let's fully explore what formulas and functions are and I'll show you the basics of how they work it's really important that you understand how formulas are constructed and the general layout and how they calculate before you can move on to more complex

formulas now You'll notice there that I've used the words formulas and functions kind of interchangeably and in many respects that is absolutely fine a formula is a calculation that uses Excel functions and if you're wondering what a function is well if you take a look on your formulas tab notice here we have a function Library and there are over 500 functions in Excel that will help you construct Very simple to very complex formulas each function is assigned to a specific group so really whatever it is that you're trying to do determines which function you're going

to use in your formula now we'll say that throughout your Excel career you're probably never ever going to use all 500 formulas a lot of them are very specialized and tailored towards specific Industries like engineering or accounting but there are Definitely 15 to 20 formulas that you'll find yourself using all the time and it's really important that you have knowledge of the basic formulas or what I call the big five formulas in Excel and that is what we're going to start out with in this section so let's take a look at how formulas are constructed

now I'm working in the formulas and functions explained workbook and you'll find that in the course files folder we have three tabs at the bottom and I'm Currently clicked on the intro tab so let's start out with a basic sum calculation where we're adding numbers together for if I have a couple of numbers in a worksheet so let's just say I have 10 and 20 in here and I now want to add both of these together I could construct a very basic formula now when you're typing in any formula into Excel you must always start

with an equals in the cell that tells Excel that you want to type an actual formula as opposed to Typing text into the cell so if I want to add 10 and 20 together I could type 10. Plus 20. and when I hit enter it's going to give me that correct answer of 30. now the way that I've done this and if I click on this cell you can see it in the formula bar this isn't the most efficient way of working with numbers in Excel because what this means is that if either of these

numbers above were to Change so let's change the 10 to a 5. the formula isn't going to update because I've hard coded the numbers into the formula a much better way of working with numbers when you're doing calculations is to use the cell references instead so what I could type instead is equals F3 plus F4 and hit enter so that gives me the answer of 25 but because I'm using the cell references Now when any of the numbers change in either of those cells the formula is going to automatically update so this cuts down in

the amount of editing I'm having to do if numbers are constantly changing so my first tip is always use cell references in your Excel formulas so that is one way I could add up some numbers but what if I have a much longer list of numbers like I have in this little table I have some figures in here let's just say they're sales figures for the months January to December for the year 2020 and I want to add them all up so that I get a total in cell C15 well what I could do here

I guess is I could type in equals and I could use the same method I could select cell C3 plus I could go to C4 plus C5 plus so on and so forth but that's going to take me quite a bit of time imagine if I had 10 000 rows of Data and I wanted to add up all of the numbers in 10 000 rows do I really want to go through and start individually selecting cells and separating them with a plus symbol no I don't so this is where we could use an Excel function

instead of just the cell references so Let's Escape out of here because we're going to use this sum function instead and sum is normally the first Formula that everybody learns in Excel now notice as I typed in the word sum I have a list of functions appear underneath and this is something called intellisense as I start to type in a formula Excel searches through its massive function library to try and match what it is that I'm typing So currently it's brought up all of the functions that have something to do with some now the one

that I want is the one at the top of this list so I could press The Tab Key simply to select it now notice what it's also done there it's put in an Open Bracket or a parentheses if you're in the US and brackets contain what we call our function arguments that is the information that we need to provide to the function so it knows what to calculate and you'll notice underneath we get a little bit of helper text so it's telling me that I need to provide some Numbers basically what do I want to

add up so what I can do here is simply select the entire cell range that I want to add up now notice that I have two dots separating C3 and c14 which basically means cell range C3 2 C 14. now if you've got an Open Bracket you must always remember to close off as many brackets as you've opened so now if I hit enter it's very quickly used the sum function to add up Everything in the cell range above now notice that I have a little green triangle in the left hand corner of this cell

and I'm going to talk to you more about what exactly that is and why it's appearing when we talk about error checking so now that we've seen our first very basic formula I just want to talk to you in a bit further detail about operators so let's jump across to the operator worksheet now when you're doing calculations in Excel you can do additions subtractions multiplications divisions and other things these are by no means all of the operators that we can use in Excel they're just really the main four and the four we're going to be

focusing on in this section so again if I had a couple of numbers in some cells here and I wanted to subtract these what I could do is I could say Excel F5 minus F4 and that's going to give me my total similarly I could do F5 multiplied which Is the Asterix symbol on your keyboard by F4 to get a different total and if I want to do a Division I can select the cell and we want to put a forward slash in there and then select our other cell to perform that calculation so don't

forget about these different operators and make sure you know where to find those on your keyboard now so far we've been taking a look at very simple formulas in their structure And what I mean by that is that we've just been adding subtracting multiplying two numbers together now what about if I have a more complex calculation so what if I wanted to type in something like 10 plus 2 divided by 2. what do you think the result of that calculation is going to be because in my mind this calculation is doing 10 plus 2 which

is going to be 12 divided by 2 which is going to give me 6. if I press Enter Excel comes back with 11. now why is it giving me a result of 11 as opposed to 6. well this has something to do with what we call the order of operations and this is going to take you all the way back to maths class when you're at school so let's jump across to the bod Mass worksheet now in maths we have the bodmas principle or the bodmas rule and I know that the acronym for this rule

is different in different countries in some Places it's referred to as pit Mass sometimes ped Mass but the rules are effectively exactly the same so I've got two versions of it listed out here and what this rule does is it tells us the order in maths that calculations are performed so basically anything that's in Brackets within a calculation is going to be calculated first it will then calculate the orders so things like square roots it will then do division followed by Multiplication then addition and then subtraction So based on this rule we can work out

why we're getting the answer of 11 as opposed to 6. so if I go back to my bodmas page and let's just type this in again 10 plus 2 divided by 2. so if we now look at the bodmas rule do I have anything in this formula in Brackets no I don't do I have any orders no I don't do I have any divisions yes I do so Excel is going to do the division first So in this case 2 divided by 2 which gives us the answer of 1. it's then going to do any

multiplications additions or subtractions and we have an addition remaining so then effectively what it's going to do is 10 plus 1 which is why we get the answer of 11. if I wanted this to calculate so that we have an answer of 6 the easiest thing to do here would be to put the 10 plus 2 within brackets because then Excel is Going to calculate 10 plus 2 first and then it's going to do the division which will give us an answer of 6. so this is a really important rule to get your head around

because it's runs through every single formula that you construct in Excel in the last lesson we've started to take a look at the sum function and as I said this sum function is by far the most popular function in Excel and one you'll find yourself using all The time and all the sum function does is it takes a range of numbers and it will add them together and as you get into more complex formulas you can use the sum function for many different things and combine it with other functions to make it really powerful but

let's not get too far ahead of ourselves at this stage but let's delve into the sum function in a little bit More detail now once again we have a very basic spreadsheet here we have some years running across the top and some months of the year and then we just have some random numbers here possibly sales figures something along those lines and what we want to do is we basically want to complete the total for each of the different years now as we've already seen we can simply click in the cell type in equals and

as We start to type in the word some it's going to come up in the list below you can press tab to put that first bracket in and then all we need to do is select the list of numbers that we want to add up in this case C3 to c14 close off the bracket and hit enter to get our result once again we have that little green triangle in the corner and I'll explain what that is in a couple of moments now there are other ways that we Can perform this sum function now it

might be that when you're first starting to learn formulas you don't particularly like typing functions directly into the cell and I know that a lot of people who are new to excel prefer to use the functions dialog box to construct their formulas so let me just show you what that is and then you can decide for yourself which method you prefer so instead of typing equal sum into this Cell what I could do is jump up to this little FX button and you'll notice here it says insert function it's also worth noting that we have

this button on the formulas tab as well it's this one just here with the keyboard shortcut of shift F3 so when we click this it's going to open up the insert function dialog box and this is a really nice method to use if you're not entirely sure what the function name is that you need to use You can see at the top here you can search for any function available in Excel or you can browse through the different categories of functions now I'm going to select all just here because what I could do is I

could type a brief description of what I want to do so maybe if I just type in add numbers and click on go it's going to pull up all of the functions that will help me do that and I can see that one of them in there is the sum function Now I can double click to select this and it's basically going to open my function arguments now remember when we're typing the function into the cell these function arguments appear in that little screen tip underneath where we're typing and this is basically exactly the same

it's just saying provide the numbers that you want me to add together and you can see here it's made a good guess based on where I'm clicked as to the Numbers that I want to add up D2 to D14 and if I check my spreadsheet that's not quite correct because D2 is actually a date so what I'm going to do is I'm just going to remove those numbers and make my selection again which is D3 to D14 notice it puts the formula in the cell for me click on OK and then I get my result

so that's another method you can use not only with the sum function but with any function that you're using in Excel the functions dialog box now another way that we can very quickly add up numbers is to use the autosum button now autosum you're going to find on the formulas tab in the functions Library group and this is one of those double-sided buttons so I can click the top half or I can click the lower half now if I click the lower half it's going to show me the different functions that I can use autosum

with so I can use it for other functions aside from some however the default action for the auto sum button is to use the sum function so that means I can just click the top half of this button so if I do that notice what happens again it tries to select the data that it thinks I want to add up and most of the time this selection is fairly accurate but again if I look at my data I can see That within this range that it's selected it's also including the column heading because effectively the

column heading is also a number now what I could do in this scenario is I can simply adjust my range notice I have these marching ants around the outside and in the corner there I have these little blue squares as I Hove my mouse over it allows me to adjust the selection so I'm going to move it down one cell and then I can Simply hit enter to complete my sum formula and an even quicker way of invoking autosum is to use the keyboard shortcut which you can see there is alt plus equals now again

if I do alt plus equals it's going to make the cell selection but for this example I need to readjust that cell selection so it doesn't include the date and hit enter so a few different methods that we can use there to quickly input a sum formula now the final thing I want to talk about here are these little green triangles in the corner of each of these total cells what are they and why are they there if you see a green triangle this is some kind of warning and warnings are always worth checking into

further so you can determine if this is actually an error that needs to be fixed or if it's something inconsequential now when I click on a cell that has one of these green Triangles notice that I get a little icon next to it which is a little warning icon and if we click this this is kind of going to give you an idea as to what the problem is so I can see here at the top of the list it says formula emits adjacent cells so what this is basically telling me is that in this

sum formula and if we look in the formula bar C3 to c14 it says it's found other data nearby that I Haven't included in my formula and that would be correct because I have these dates at the top here which are effectively numbers to excel but to me they're dates and I don't want them included in the formula so that is what this error is referring to it's basically saying hey you've missed out a number in cell C2 do you want to correct this before you go on now I know that these years are not

supposed to be included in these Formulas so what I can safely do here is select all of the cells where I have this little warning click the drop down and just say ignore error to get rid of them another function that belongs in the category of the big five functions that everybody needs to know in Excel is the count function and what this function allows you to do is basically count the number of items In a range or a list so let's take a look at a basic example because there is a very important Point

here that you need to understand now in this worksheet I just have a list of student names and I have the score that they've achieved in a test and basically all I'm trying to do here is count the number of students that took a test so we just want to count the number of items that I have in this list now bear in mind that this list is a Very short list and this is probably something I could just do visually but again remember with all of these examples imagine if you have a list of

thousands and thousands of students that is where the count function is going to be really useful so what we can do here is we can type into the cell equals and this function is simply called count and notice again as I start to type it in excel's intellisense is pulling up a list of all Of the functions that it finds in its Library related to count and if you find the one that you want to use and if the one that you want isn't at the top of the list you can use your arrow keys

to move further down and select the one that you want also notice that with count highlighted I get a little bit of informational text to the side which tells me what that function does so it says counts the number of cells in A Range that contains numbers and that is the really important part in a Range that contains numbers so let's press the Tab Key to make our selection and put in that first bracket now our arguments here are basically the values that we want to count so I want to count the number of students

so I'm going to go across to my little table I'm going to select all of the student names So that I have my range B3 to be 15. I'm going to close off my bracket and hit enter I get a result of zero now why is that well it's down to that very important part of instructional text the count function will count numbers in a list so because I selected these student names which are effectively text for my formula that's why I'm getting an answer of 0. if I double click to edit this formula And

instead of cells B3 to B15 I'm going to count using the test scores instead so this time my range contains numbers I'm going to close off my bracket hit enter and now it's working it's telling me that I have 13 items in the range that I selected so what do I do if I want to count anything in the cell regardless of whether it's text or if it's numbers well for that I need to use a slightly different function So let's double click on our cell I'm going to delete everything out so if I want

to count basically all I would use the count a formula notice this time it says counts the number of cells in a Range that are not empty so it's not going to count empty cells either so now that I'm using count a which will count all or count everything if I open a bracket I can use either the student range or the test score range and this formula should work So let's use the student name because this is the one that didn't work when we were just using count let's close the bracket hit enter and

now I'm getting the correct result of 13. now how does this work if we have blank cells well let's go in and delete out Olivia from this list so effectively I have a blank cell in this cell range notice immediately as soon as I did that the number of students decreased to 12. so count a doesn't count blank cells What about count well let's try that let's double click let's type in our formula again let's do count I'm going to count the test scores because with count we can only count numbers close the bracket and

hit enter and again that also gives me 12 so it also doesn't count the blank cells now what about if I just wanted to count the blank cells in a Range well we have another count formula that we can use For that as well and that is Count blank I can see it's the third one in my list so I'm going to use my arrow keys to go down Tab Key to select it and this time I just need to select my range of cells if I select these student names cells B3 to B15 and

hit enter it's returning the result of 1 because in this range it's found one blank cell so there's three formulas there related to Counting items count which will count Numeric values in cells count a which will count anything and count blank which will count just the blank cells now I'm going to control z a few times just to put Olivia back into my student list because remember with these formulas you can also use other methods as well so we looked at previously the functions dialog box we can use that for count as well so if

I click the FX icon I could go in here and search for count There it is at the top of the list and basically I can then go in and select the values that I want to count so I'm going to select the test scores click on OK and the formula works I could also use that auto sum button so if we go back to the formulas tab click the lower half of Auto sum we can also use this to count numbers now notice a problem as soon as we do this cell where I want

my result to be Returned is far away from the actual data it doesn't know which values I want to count so it's just put the count formula in there for me and now it's asking for me to select these values so I would need to go in select the range and hit enter if I was doing this formula directly underneath where I have these numbers if I choose Auto sum and count numbers because the result cell is right next to the numbers That I want to count it's recognized that those numbers are there and it's

automatically input the cell range for me so I just need to hit enter so just be aware of those little things when you're using things like autosum but that in his Essence is how you can construct three different types of count formula another one of the big five functions that all Excel users need to know is the average function and the average Function is pretty much what you would expect it to be it's a function that helps you find the average of the values in the selected cell range and much like the other functions that

we've looked at in the last few lessons the sum function and the count function we can either type this function directly into the cell or we can use the functions dialog box so let's take a look at how the average function works so on this worksheet I Have some years running across the top and then again some months running down column B and then we have some values in this table and what I want to do is at the end here in column G I want to find the average amount of sales for January across

all four of these years 2018 to 2021 so for this we can simply type in average into the cell once again as soon as you can see it in excel's intellisense menu you can just press the Tab Key to select it and we have very Similar arguments to the sum and count functions here Excel just requires us to select the cell range that we want to find the average of so I want to find the average of these four cells C3 to F3 I'm going to close my bracket and I'm going to do control enter

so that I stay in the same cell and there I have the average sales figure so really nice and straightforward now of course we've seen how we can do this using the functions Dialog box it's a simple case of searching for the average command double clicking and then we can go in and select the cell range that we want to find the average of so pretty much the same as what we've done in the last two examples so just to finish off this lesson let's jump up to the formulas Tab and we're going to go

to the auto sum drop down because notice in there we can also use autosum to find the average If we click average again notice it's made an incorrect selection so all I need to do here is select the cells that I actually want to work with Ctrl enter to stay in the same cell now if you have a scenario like this where you need to complete the averages for a number of different values like we have here we need to complete these average totals you don't need to go to every single cell and complete an

average formula and this is going to lead us on Nicely to a lesson that we're going to do a bit later on because what we have in Excel is the ability to auto fill or copy formulas down and this is such a useful time-saving utility now if I hover my mouse over cell G4 where I have my last average calculation notice in the bottom right hand corner I have that little green square that is my auto fill handle so if I want to copy this formula down to fill the rest of these cells I can

Simply drag all the way down like so or alternatively I'm just very quickly going to control Z to undo that I can double click and it's also going to copy that formula down and notice if we pick any of these so let's say let's go to this cell just here G9 notice that the references C9 to F9 are highlighted in blue in the formula and it's also showing me the cells that that formula refers to in the Table highlighted in blue as well and I can see that as this formula has moved down Excel has

automatically adjusted the cell references that it needs to use for this formula and that is what we call relative referencing when we drag a formula down Excel will adjust the cell references accordingly and again we're going to talk more about that a bit later on because there are two other types of referencing aside from relative and that is absolute and mixed but for The time being just be aware of this concept of relative referencing when you copy formulas down so far in this course we've looked at three of excel's big five basic functions that everybody

needs to know so it's now time to finish off this little list with the final two and the final two functions that everybody needs to know are the Min and the max functions now what the Min function does is that it will return the Lowest value in a range of cells and as you would expect the max function does the exact opposite it will return the maximum value in a range of cells so these are pretty simple to construct let's start with men I'm going to type in equals Min I'm going to press the Tab

Key to select it from the list and put in that first bracket and once again we have some very simple arguments we're just required to select the numbers or the cell range that we Want to find the minimum value of so I'm going to select this cell range just here C3 to F3 and what this is going to do is tell me which value is the lowest so when I hit enter it's telling me that 6247 is the lowest value in that range so I can see at a glance that for January we had the

lowest sales in 2019. I can do exactly the same for Max let's type it in let's select our cell Range close the bracket and hit enter and now I have the maximum value which was in 2021 now once again I'm going to want to copy all of these formulas down both of these columns so let me show you another way that you can very efficiently do this I'm going to select the two formulas that I've already done and all of the other blank cells and if I press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl D that's going to

copy that formula down each column and if we just double check one of these so let's double click somewhere Down here just to double check that it's actually calculating correctly so C9 to F9 the lowest value there is 5538 and I can see that yes that is correct so Ctrl D is another really useful little shortcut when it comes to quickly copying a formula into other cells in this lesson I'd like to start introducing you to some of the basic errors that you might come across when you're working with formulas and calculations in Excel because

a very Important skill to have is to know how to check your spreadsheets for errors and also what those errors mean and how you can resolve them the last thing you want particularly if you're sharing a spreadsheet with other people is to send it out with all different types of errors all over the place so in this lesson we're going to look at some of the most basic ones now in a previous lesson I showed you how to deal with these little green triangles That you can see in the top left hand corner and in

most cases when you get something like this you can click on that warning symbol and the first item in the list will give you some idea as to what that error is there for so as we determined for this one I'm getting these little green triangles because the formula has recognized that I also have numbers in the top row that I'm not including in my formulas and because these are the actual years I Don't actually want to include them in the formula anyway so for these ones we can simply select and choose to ignore the

error so what other types of Errors might we come across we can see that I have three of them listed out in column I now the first one is a name error and if you see a name error in any of your cells it normally means that there's some kind of issue with your formula related to either the name of the Formula or maybe something like the named range that you've used within your formula now we haven't covered named ranges yeah we're going to cover those in the next section so let's take this from the

standpoint that we've got a problem with the name of our formula so the first thing I would do here is I would double click so I can take a look at this formula and I can see here immediately that the name of the function is wrong now this might be a Simple typo maybe I was typing sum particularly quickly and I've accidentally added an x on the end so I can immediately see here that this is what is causing that name error but what about if I wasn't so sure maybe I didn't know that sumex

wasn't the name of the function how else could I troubleshoot the formula in this cell well let's press Ctrl enter I could jump up to the formulas Tab and we have a formula auditing section just Here and this is where you can come for all of your tools that will help you find where errors are located in your spreadsheets for example for this particular formula if I click on Trace precedence this is going to show me any of the cells that are being used in this formula so I can see here I've got an arrow

pointing to these total sales figures highlighted in blue so it's basically telling me That this cell range is referenced in the formula so it might be that when I click on Trace precedence this arrow is pointing to a completely different set of cells that I didn't mean to include in my formula so then it's fairly easy for me to adjust that cell range I'm going to remove the arrows what about Trace dependence well I don't have any dependence for this formula nothing relies on this particular formula to calculate what about if I click on show

Formulas or take a look at what this does this is going to show all of the formulas that you have on your worksheet so you can see here I can now see actually on the worksheet without having to double click to edit the cell all of those sum calculations in that total row I can also see the formulas that I have over in column I so show formulas is a great way if you just want to quickly see all of the formulas on your worksheet now what About error checking what happens if I click here

well this is basically going to evaluate my formula and it's telling me that there is an error in cell i3 now I have a few different options here I can ignore the error I can edit the formula in the formula bar I can get some help or I can show the calculation steps so I'm going to show the calculation Steps and it basically takes me into this evaluate formula window incidentally I also get this window if I click on the evaluate formula button in the formula editing group now what this allows you to do is

walk step by step through your formula and evaluate each part separately so you can pinpoint where the error is occurring so I can see that the first thing that's going to be evaluated in this formula is the actual formula name in this case sum X so if I click on evaluate I can see there it's coming up with name so this is where my issue is occurring because that is where the error is appearing so this evaluate tool is pretty useful particularly when you start to get into more complex formulas which may be combine multiple

different functions being able to step through them and evaluate each part individually to really determine where the error lies Is so helpful so let's click on close and let's click on close again so I now am pretty confident that this is causing the problem so let's delete out the X hit enter and like magic my formula is now fixed what about this next error we have a reference error let's double click and take a look at this now this doesn't really tell me much it says sum and then we have reference so What I'm going

to do here is I'm going to go straight to evaluate formula and I can see that the sum part of this formula is fine it's this part that's causing the problem the hash reference now you normally get things like reference errors when you've maybe referred to a cell in the formula that no longer exists so you can see here this cell is supposed to be displaying the total sales for December so so I bet there was Probably a sum calculation in here that was totaling all of December's sales and if I take a look at

my table where's December gone December has actually been deleted so that is why I'm getting this reference error the row was there when I first constructed the formula but at a later time someone's gone in and deleted that row out which means my formula is now invalid so look out for things like that when you see reference errors it normally means whatever you're referring To whatever cell has either been pasted over with something else or deleted entirely so for this one because we no longer have December totals I maybe will want to change this to

the last month which is November so now let's do a sum calculation of November and there we go that looks a little bit better another type of error that you might see is a div error and this comes up when you've tried to divide a number By zero now the formula that I've got here is just very simply one divided by zero just to show you an example of what that error looks like in most cases when you get a div error it's not that clean cut you might be doing again a longer complex formula

and somewhere along the way in the way that you've constructed that formula you've ended up dividing it by zero maybe you haven't even realized that you've done that so if you see that div error it's worth taking a look at That formula and checking to make sure your calculation is correct so for this one let's just take that out and we're just going to do the total sales for Q2 so that is going to be all of these figures just here close the bracket hit enter and now I have a spreadsheet that's completely error free

now there are a number of other different errors that you'll see Pop Up from time to time in your spreadsheets you might see a value error Or you might see a null error as well and we'll come across more of these as we progress through the course but for now that should give you an introduction as to some of the most common errors and how you can use the tools available in Excel in that formula auditing group to do some troubleshooting one of the most important Concepts to understand when you're learning Excel is the difference

between absolute and Relative referencing and I did mention this briefly a couple of lessons ago and it's worth noting that by default Excel uses relative referencing so let me show you a very quick example of relative referencing and then we'll dive into absolute and why it's different from relative so just to demonstrate relative referencing I'm going to type in some numbers just down here and we're going to type in some numbers uh next to these Like so so maybe here I want to have the totals of these numbers so what I could do is type

in sum I can select the cell Range close the bracket hit enter and then I can drag to copy that formula down now as I drag this formula down Excel uses relative referencing to adjust the cell references if we double click in this first Total you can see the cells that this formula references I6 and j6 if I take a look at the last formula you can See the Excel has adjusted those cell references as I've dragged that formula down so now it's summing I8 to j8 and it's this relative referencing that allows me to

copy this formula down and all of my formulas remain correct and relative referencing is the default in Excel but as you'll soon find it doesn't always work in every situation it's not always the most appropriate type of referencing to use the so with that in Mind let's take a look at an example of absolute referencing now what you can see here on this worksheet is that I have in column A some employee names in column B I have the Departments that they work in in column C we have the number of years they've been working

there and then finally in column D we have their salary now the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to change these to British pounds because that is what my Excel is currently set to so I'm going to keep everything nice and consistent now what I want to do here is I want to work out the bonus amount for each of these employees and I can see over in cell J1 all staff members are getting a bonus of two percent lucky old then so how would I do this calculation well this

is going to be a straightforward sum calculation what we want to do here is we want to take the Salary in cell D2 and we're going to multiply it by the Bonus amount of two percent in cell J1 I'm going to close my bracket and hit enter and now I can see there that the bonus is 697.56 so that amount is two percent of their total salary now once again I'm just going to change the formatting of this column to pounds so great everything is working so far and what I want to do here is

I Want to do the exactly the same thing for all of the other employees so effectively I should be able to grab my autofill handle and drag this formula down right wrong take a look at what happens it's not working I'm getting zero in all of these other cells so why am I getting zero well let's double click and take a look at one of these formulas a bit further down so we can see which cells the formula is Referring to so here we go it's doing a sum of d11 which is correct in this

case we want to multiply the salary but take a look at J10 J10 is over here and that is a blank cell because Excel has assumed that if I'm dragging this formula down it needs to modify the cell references and move those down one each time as well and for the salary part of this calculation that is absolutely fine but it's not fine for the bonus in this Example we always want this formula to refer to cell J1 we don't want it to adjust and move down to any blank cells so with that in mind

we need to make cell J1 absolute so let's delete out everything we have and let's do our formula again so we're going to say equals sum it's still going to be D2 we're still going to multiply it by J1 but we need to make J1 absolute now the way that we do that is we press the F4 key once on our Keyboard and what that will do is it's going to place dollar signs in front of the column and the row number so basically what those dollar signs are are a way of locking to that

particular cell so I'm saying lock column J and column 1. I can close the bracket hit enter and now if I double click to copy this formula down the formula is working if we take a look at one of the formulas a bit further down we can see again the cells this is referring to and this time This is absolutely correct it's referring to cells d17 and it's multiplying by J 1. so knowing when to use absolute referencing is a really important skill in Excel now there is another type of referencing that you can do

called mixed referencing and that is where we basically either lock just the column or just the row and those are by far the least common ways of using cell referencing most of the time you're going to be using absolute Or relative so for the time being we're just going to stick to those two so you get some practice and then later on we'll take a look at mixed referencing so now these calculations are correct the only thing left for me to do here is complete the new salary for everybody and the new salary is basically

going to be a sum calculation again where we're going to do the salary plus their bonus so equals sum and we want to say salary plus Bonus this time we're fine with relative cell referencing because we want to copy down and it's fine for the cell references to adjust each time so let's double click to copy that down and once again I'm just going to change this to currency format and now we have a completed bonus spreadsheet in previous lessons in this course we've briefly had a look at how autosum and autofill work so it's

time now to take a Deeper dive into these two really powerful utilities So currently I'm working in the autosarm and autofill workbook and I'm clicked on the example one tab and on this tab we have a table with some values that we need to complete so the first thing I'm going to do is we're going to complete this totals row at the bottom and as we've seen previously we're just doing a sum calculation here we can use The autosum button and if you recall Auto sum you'll find that on the formulas tab in the function

Library group alternatively you can use the keyboard shortcut of alt equals now remember because I have a number in that top row I need to adjust the selection and then I can hit enter and because we want to copy this formula across to the other years we can simply use the autofill handle in the bottom Right hand corner and drag that formula across now we have our little warning triangle so I'm going to click the warning symbol and I'm just going to say ignore this error so now let's use autofilm to complete the rest of

these empty cells so the first thing I'm going to do in this totals column is we're going to do a very simple sum calculation and we're going to add up all of the sales figures for January C3 to F3 Close the bracket and I'm going to do Ctrl enter so that I stay in the same cell now notice over on the right hand side I've just listed out there four different methods for auto filling formulas down and we've already seen a couple of these but there are a couple in there as well that we haven't

yet taken a look at now the first way to auto fill down a formula is to Hove your mouse over the autofill handle and Double click to copy that formula down let's move to column H and let's work out the averages and again we're using the same cell range and this time what I can do is simply drag that formula down in the next column we're going to do a Min formula and remember Min returns us the lowest value in our cell range C3 to F3 now the third method that I can use to fill

down is I can select all the cells that I Want to fill this formula in go to the Home tab and then over in the editing group notice we have a drop down here next to fill and I can choose fill down and that's going to fill that formula into those remaining cells and similarly an even quicker way of executing that let's just put in our Max formula at the top here control enter we can pretty much do exactly the same thing by highlighting all of the cells and using the keyboard Shortcut instead of control

D to copy that formula down and then of course once these are done if I want to complete the totals as well I can simply drag my totals formula across and in a couple of minutes we have a completed worksheet now staying on this subject of autofill there are still a number of different options that we haven't looked at yet and all of these little autofill options are so helpful when it comes to being able to input Data into your worksheets quickly and efficiently now I did mention earlier I was going to show you a

quick way of adding in lots of numbers into a worksheet for example maybe I need to enter into this worksheet numbers 1 to 200 so instead of going through and typing in one two three so on and so forth I can get Excel to do all the hard work for me now what I'm going to do here is a little trick which involves accessing a Hidden menu so I'm going to type number one into this first cell and then what I'm going to do is using my right Mouse button not my left my right I'm

going to hover my mouse over the corner of that cell so that I get the little auto fill cross hold down my right Mouse button drag down one cell up one cell and release the mouse and it's going to present me with a little secret menu And this allows me to fill my cells in different ways so I'm going to say fill series and what I want to do here is I want to fill the column with numbers the step value is the value which I want the numbers to increase so I want them to

go one two three four so my step value is one and I want it to stop at 200. and if I click on OK check that out I now have all of those numbers input control down to go to the bottom the Last value there is 200. so that's a really nice quick way of getting lots of numbers long lists of numbers into your worksheet now we can do a similar thing here if we want to fill down dates so quite often in spreadsheets you'll have dates so maybe if you're putting together an invoice spreadsheet

you're going to have the dates listed out of all of the invoices so what you could do is type in the first day let's say the 1st of November 2021 and if I auto fill down this time notice that it auto fills down consecutive days so simply by using that autofill handle I'm going to get the first November second third fourth fifth so on and so forth and that's absolutely fine if that's what you want in some cases you might want a different kind of date so maybe I want to fill down the last day

of every month so how would we do that well let's type In the last day of January so that is the 31st of the first 2021. now as I said if I go to copy this down the next date it's going to fill in is going to be the first of February 2nd of February so on and so forth now we can change this simply by dragging the autofill button down and I'm just going to drag down to there but notice when we drag down we get this little what we call a smart tag at

the bottom and if you click this it's going to open Up some additional auto fill options and from here we get to choose what dates we're filling down so if I want the last day of the month I could say fill months and it's going to change all of those like magic to Now display the last day of the month so don't forget about this little smart tag when you drag down it's always worth having a look in there and seeing if something else fits more with what it is that you're trying to do now

we've Already seen how we can type in the name of a month and then simply use the autofill handle to drag down to fill in the other months the same works with days and this works with the long version of the day or the short version of the day once again I can drag down to complete those days and it will just loop around until you choose to stop filling cells so where does this come from in Excel well these are actually what we call Custom lists and you'll find your custom lists underneath Excel options

if we jump into file and go down to options at the bottom and then into the advanced page if we scroll all the way down to near the bottom you'll notice that we have this little button just here edit custom lists and when we jump into here you're going to see all of those patterns that Excel recognizes And it's because this exists here the Excel is able to copy down the months of the year and the days of the week and if you wanted to you can create your own custom lists and use them in

the same way now I could choose to import a list that I've got in a worksheet so maybe in some cells or I could choose to create my own custom list so if you click new list at the top I can then type in my list entries so maybe on a frequent basis I have to Type in the names of all of the people that work in my department and instead of doing that manually I want to be able to just type in the first one and auto fill down so I'm going to create a

brand new list with the names of everybody who works in my department so we're just going to have four people and let's say add and you can now see that I have a new custom list so if I click on OK And OK again to come out of options now if I want to fill in those employees all I need to do is type in the name of the first one and then Excel is going to recognize that custom list so I can simply drag down so all of these autofill options are definitely worth exploring

because they really do make you more efficient when you're working in Excel flash fail is possibly one of my favorite Utilities in Excel A flashfull hasn't been around forever it was introduced in Excel 2013 and if you find yourself having to split up data or even combine data from different columns fairly frequently Flash Fill is going to be your best friend this takes all of the hard work out of it so the best way to demonstrate Flash Fill is to really dive into some examples and I've got three different examples to show you here so

in this first example in this first Table notice that I have a list of employee names and what I've been asked to do is break up the full name into a column full of first names and a column full of last names now before the introduction of Flash Fill it was possible to do this but you would have to use the text to columns utility or possibly use an Excel formula but now we have Flash Fill so this is a piece of cake so let me show you how it works all you need to do

is basically Tell Excel what you want the pattern to be so in the first name cell I'm going to type in how I want the first one to look so I basically just want it to list out my first name I'm going to press Ctrl enter to stay in the same cell and then I'm going to invoke The Flash Fill tool and we find Flash Fill Up on the data ribbon in that data tools group in the middle there we have a Flash Fill button Let's click and would you take a look at that like

magic it recognizes the pattern and it copies it down and the best thing about this is that there are no underlying formulas that you need to get rid of or are going to cause you any problems let's do the same but this time we want to complete the last name once again we just need to type in what the pattern is going to be Ctrl enter to stay in the same cell and we can invoke Flash Fill in an entirely different way So if I press enter just here as soon as I start to type

the second name goes down the rest of them and basically says to me is this what you want to input I can quickly do a visual check yes those are all of the last names so all I need to do is hit the enter key to accept that so nice and easy we could even use Flash Fill to complete email addresses for people as well now there is a bit of a caveat to this And that is that everybody needs to have these same email address and more often than not if you're filling down a

list of people that you work with you're all going to work at the same organization and so you're all going to have the same email address so what I can do here is again give Excel the pattern so I want Excel to pick out that I want the person's initials at and then we're just going to say Company X dot com control enter to stay in the cell and a third way that I can invoke Flash Fill is to basically highlight all of the cells that we want to fill and use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl

e and again take a look at that it's recognized that I want the initials of every single employee and then it's per companyx.com we could also utilize Flash Fill if we want to extract parts of an Order number or maybe an invoice number or a part number something like that for example all of these long order numbers have ORD at the beginning I don't really need that part I just want to extract the last three characters so once again we can use Flash Fill for that one two three is what I want to extract and

I can use any of The Flash Fill methods so Ctrl enter to stay in the same cell I'm going to select all the cells I want to fill and Ctrl e to Fill those down so quick and simple the final example here is another way that we can extract different parts of a product name so in the product name column you can see that I have red shirt and then I have the item code and I basically want to split this up so we have the color of the product the product name and then the

item code in three separate columns so for this I can say red control enter I'm going to highlight and Ctrl e to Flash Fill down next I want the product so let's tell Excel what the pattern is Ctrl enter and this time I think I'll use my Flash Fill button to fill those down and then finally we need to type the item code one two three let's hit enter and this time if I start to type the next item code it's going to fill them all down for me and I can simply hit enter to

accept in this exercise exercise three we're Going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in this section on working with formulas so for this exercise we're going to be using the data on the customer data tab so what I'd like you to do first is to calculate the total sales for all customers in column d so this is what we're doing first just calculate the number of sales based on the quantity and the price per item I'd then like you to auto fill that formula Down next I'd like you to calculate the sales

tax for all customers in column e using the sales tax figure in cell I2 so we're calculating the sales tax in this column using the sales tax figure and one thing to think about when you're doing this is think about whether you're doing absolute or relative referencing I'd then like you to calculate the total including the tax in column F and then auto fill that formula down then finally just to make sure that your formulas are All updating I'd like you to change the sales tax amount to six percent and just ensure that the values

in the table update next we're going to take a look at how you can use functions in calculations so this section we're performing calculations in this table just here so the first thing I would like you to do is in cell I4 calculate the total sales in cell I5 I'd like you to calculate the average quantity of items bought by each customer in cell Six I'd like you to calculate the minimum price per item in cell 7 I'd like you to calculate the maximum price per item and finally in cell I8 at like you to

calculate the total number of customers so quite a bit to do there see how you get along and if you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching so the first thing I asked you to do here was to calculate the total in column D so this is going to be a very basic sum calculation we want to do the Quantity multiplied by the price per item close the bracket Ctrl enter to stay in the same cell I then asked you to fill this down so we simply need to double click to copy the

formula down next I asked you to calculate the sales tax and currently we have the sales tax listed over in cell I2 so again this is a sum calculation we're doing the total multiplied by the sales tax now when we copy this down we don't want That sales tax to move so we need to make cell I4 absolute by pressing the F4 key close the bracket Ctrl enter and then we can double click to copy that formula down the final calculation we need to perform here is just a very simple sum calculation where we add

together the total and the sales tax close the bracket Ctrl enter and double click to copy the formula down in the Second part of this exercise I asked you to complete the values in this smaller table so the first thing I asked you to calculate were the total sales now I didn't actually specify in the exercise whether I wanted you to calculate the totals excluding tax or including tax so whichever one of these you did that is absolutely fine I'm going to do it excluding tax so I simply want to do a sum calculation and

then I'm going to select Ctrl shift down all of the Numbers in this column close the bracket hit enter and there we have the total next I wanted you to work out the average quantity so we're going to use the average function go to the quantity column control shift down arrow close off the bracket hit enter and there we have the average quantity next we're going to use the Min function to work out the minimum price per item so once again click Ctrl shift down arrow close the bracket hit enter Next we want to do

the reverse so we're going to use the max function the same column of data control shift down arrow close the bracket and hit enter and then finally we want to work out the number of customers so for this I'm going to use count a because I want to count text so click Ctrl shift down arrow close the bracket hit enter and I can see that we have 50 customers the final thing I asked you to do was just to change the sales tax from 4.5 to 6 just to make Sure that all of these figures

update so in I2 I'm just going to type in 6 hit enter and yes I can see that everything has now updated in this section we're going to explore the wonderful world of named ranges and named ranges are another one of my favorite things in Excel not only can you use named ranges to help you navigate across multiple workbooks but you can use them in formulas so that your formulas are not Only easier to construct but also easier to interpret and read now before we get into how we create named ranges and how we use

them in calculations let's start out by discussing exactly what a named range is so that you understand now as we've already seen we can select different groups of cells using our Mouse and when we select a group of cells this is referred to as a range of cells and we often use cell ranges when we're Performing calculations for example if I wanted to sum all of the totals I would select the cell range F4 down to F 17 and that would be my range and what a named range is is basically assigning a meaningful name

to a range of cells so instead of just identifying a range as for example h10 to h14 I might choose to call this range blank cells something like that and I can then use that name in my formulas as opposed to having to go in and select the cell range each Time now in this workbook I have numerous different named ranges already set up and you can see all of your named ranges by clicking this drop down arrow in the name box notice I have five named ranges in here one for customer orders price per

unit quantity and total and what you'll also notice is that each of these named ranges corresponds to the column headings in this table and if I click on the price per unit named range It's going to highlight that range of cells so effectively this cell range E4 to E17 is called price per unit so each one of these cell ranges has been assigned a name this is the cell range assigned to customer this one quantity and you can see it in the name box just here we have total just here and then we have the

orders range and in the table on the right hand side we have some calculations now if you take a look up in the formula bar this first Calculation this is going to look a little bit different to the formulas that we've constructed previously I'm doing an average calculation I'm trying to find the average quantity but instead of selecting the cell range which would be D4 down to d17 notice it just says quantity in there it's using the named range as opposed to the cell references if I go to the next Formula down this one is

doing a count of all of the orders And again instead of using a cell range I'm using the named range and instantly by looking at this formula it's a lot easier for anybody looking at this worksheet to kind of figure out what it is that you're trying to do instead of just some random cell references in there they can see okay let's do an account of the orders so it makes it more meaningful another thing that you can use named ranges for is Quick Navigation so if I was clicked on Another worksheet let's just create

another one very quickly if I was working away over here and I wanted to quickly jump back to one of those ranges I can simply select it from the name range drop down and it's going to jump me back to that worksheet and highlight that range of cells so it's also quite nice if you want to use it for navigation I would say that that is kind of its secondary purpose and most of the time the primary use of named ranges is To create meaning when you're constructing formulas now in the next lesson we're going

to take a look at how you create named ranges because there are a number of different methods that you can use but just to give you a heads up we're going to be working on the formulas tab at the top in the defined names group in the middle here this is where you'll find all of your options for creating named ranges so I'm going to head over there now and I look Forward to you joining me so now we know what a named range is let's look at the different ways that we can create them

now what we're going to do here is basically what I showed you in the example in the previous lesson we're going to create named ranges for all of the columns that we have in this table and I want the named ranges to be called whatever the column heading for that particular column Is Now by far the Simplest and quickest way to name a range is by using the name box so what I'm going to do here is I'm going to select the range of cells click up in the name box and then give my range

a name so this is going to be called orders now it's really important when you're typing in names for your ranges that you don't have any spaces in the names now my range is just one word orders but if I wanted to call it order numbers for Example I wouldn't be able to put a space in there and type in numbers that's not going to work I would either need to type it in as order numbers or one word or I need to separate the words with an underscore instead so just remember that when you're

naming your ranges also really important to remember to hit the enter key to set that named range so that is the first method you can use the second method you can use is to Select the range of cells that you want to name including that column heading and then on the formulas tab in the defined names group use the create from selection button now what this will do is it's going to create a named range for you and it's going to name the range based on the values in whichever row or column you specify so

because I've highlighted the top row I want it to name this range based on The value in the top row so that is customer let's click on OK and if you want to check to make sure that your named ranges are setting effectively you can click the drop down and you can see them listed out here the next method you can use to create a named range is to click on the name manager button and notice this has a keyboard shortcut of Control Plus F3 so if we jump into the name manager this Is basically

where we come to manage all of our different named ranges and you can see in there the two named ranges that I've currently set up what I can also do is create a new named range from here as well by clicking the new button I can give my range a name so let's call this range quantity I want it to be available in this workbook I could add a comment if I wanted to and then I select the cells That this range refers to so that's going to be these cells just here and click on

OK so now I have three named ranges created and then the final method I can use to create a named range is the Define name option in the defined names group again I can just give my range a name so this one is going to be price per unit remember we're separating with underscores and then I can specify which Cells this range refers to so that is my cell range E4 to E17 and another thing to know about these named ranges is take a look at the cell references they're all absolute by default and this

is a really important point when it comes to using your named ranges in your formulas so I'll talk more about this at a later stage let's click on OK and now I have four named ranges set up let's do the final one and I'm just Going to do this using the create from selection method and now I have all of my named ranges created so that is it those are the four different methods that you can use to create named ranges before we move on to using named ranges in formulas and calculations I just very

briefly want to show you where you go if you want to edit your named ranges or delete named ranges and we have actually been into this little area once already In this section so if you want to manage your named ranges you need to make sure that you're clicked on the formulas Tab and then we're going to click on name manager and as we've seen this opens up a little panel which we can make bigger if we need to and that's going to show us all of the named ranges that we have in the workbook

that's a really important distinction the scope for these named ranges is the workbook and you can see that in this column just Here and what that basically means is that these named ranges will be available to use in any worksheet that I create in this specific workbook if I was to create a brand new workbook then I'm not going to have access to these named ranges now the other information that we can see in here is basically the name of the range the values contained within that range the worksheet name and these else that this

range refers to so you can see that all of my ranges are on The named ranges worksheet and then we have those absolute cell references and then as we just mentioned the scope is just this workbook so if I want to go in and make any changes to this information I have an edit button just above which will allow me to edit certain elements of this named range so if I wanted to change the name of the range I can do that from here I can add some comments if I want to and I can

Also change which worksheets or which cells this named range refers to so super simple to make edits to any of these ranges we've already seen that we can click the new button and create a brand new range from here and this is also where we have the delete button as well so if you want to delete out any named ranges that you're no longer using this is where you can come and then all the way over on the right hand side of this window notice That we have a filter button now I will say that

if you have a fairly short list of named ranges like I do here I only really have five of them then this filter is a little bit of Overkill however you might find that in some more complex workbooks particularly if you have lots and lots of worksheets you could have many many named ranges so you're going to need a quick way of filtering out the ones you're not interested in and just viewing the ones That you are interested in and that's where this filter comes in this basically allows you to filter your list of named

ranges so I can search for ranges which are just scoped to this worksheet or just to this workbook I can filter for ranges with errors or names without errors so this is particularly useful for error checking and then I can also filter my defined name so named ranges or table names now we haven't got on to talking about Tables as yet but we'll come back into here when we do so you can see what the difference is between these bottom two and then of course if you have applied any filters and you want to restore

the entire list we have a clear filter button at the top just there so that filter button is great if you have a lot of named ranges that you need to sort through so that is pretty much it let's click on close to come out of here that is where you go if you need to edit Delete or manage named ranges so now that we've created our named ranges it's time to take a look at how we can use them in formulas so we're going to complete this little table on the right hand side and

utilize some of those big five formulas that we've already learned in this course so the first Formula that we need to construct is an average formula and what we want to do here is we want to find out the average quantity so let's start Out by typing in average I'm going to press my Tab Key to select it from that list and now we need to provide the values that we want to find the average of now it's at this stage normally I would go in and select the cell range in this worksheet but because

we've set this range up as a named range I can simply use the name and this range is called quantity now to Pull that up or input it into the formula if I start typing the word quantity notice that intellisense also picks up any named ranges that you have in your worksheet so it's not just formulas that you're going to see in that menu underneath you're also going to see any named ranges that you've created so once it's found the named range it's highlighted so I can simply press the Tab Key notice that the word

quantity is In blue and the range is highlighted in blue in the table all that's left for me to do here is close off my bracket hit enter and there I get the answer so that is a really nice easy way of incorporating those named ranges into your formulas and if you look at this formula it's very simple to see exactly what this formula is doing let's do this one more time this time we want to do a count of the number of orders So we're going to type in count press the Tab Key and

this time I want to use the range that I called orders again we can start to type it in it finds it in the list Tab Key close the bracket hit enter and we are done now so far in those two examples that is very much relied on me remembering what I've called my named range and it might be that if you're working in a spreadsheet that maybe you last Looked at six months ago you can't necessarily remember all of the names of the ranges in your spreadsheet so let's do this next one and I'm

going to show you a little work around for that so now we need to find out what the minimum sales are so we're going to use min press that Tab Key and if I can't remember that it's the total range that I want if I press the F3 key on my keyboard that's going to pop open a little window that's going to list out All of the named ranges that I have in this workbook so now I can take a little look through the different names yes that's the one I want Total select it and

it's going to input it into my formula close off the bracket hit enter and I can do exactly the same for Max once again I can press F3 select total click on OK close the bracket and hit enter and then the final one here is just a sum calculation so we Can type in sum and this time I'm just going to start to type total select it from that list close the bracket and hit enter and I need to just adjust the formatting on these to make them British pounds and there we go that is

how you can use named ranges in your formulas now another important point to note here is if you have used named ranges in your formulas and then that named range gets deleted that's Going to mess up your formula let me show you what I mean if we jump up to the formulas Tab and remember to delete named ranges we need to jump into the name manager so if I decide that I want to delete this totals range let's click on delete and okay notice what happens to my formulas I now get this name error and

if you remember in a previous lesson when we were looking at errors that you can come Across in Excel one of them was this name error and I said to you that a name error either means that you have a problem with the name of the formula maybe you've misspelled it or you have a problem with the name of the named range so in this case the formula name is correct but the name range no longer exists so what I would need to do to fix this is either go in and replace these with cell

references so select the cell reference Close the bracket and hit enter or I could create the named range again so let's select this create from selection I'm going to call it total and now that is fixed those two formulas so just be aware of that deleting named ranges can affect any formulas where you're using the named range in this exercise we're going to practice the skills that we've learned in this section related to named ranges So in the first part of this exercise I'd like you to practice naming different ranges in your worksheet and the

worksheet that we're using is the customer data worksheet so the first thing I'd like you to do is go through and name the following data ranges A2 to A52 I'd like you to name that range customer name B2 to B52 I'd like you to name that range quantity and what you'll notice is that these ranges are basically just The ranges that you see here and they're all going to be named according to the column heading so go through and create all of those named ranges I'd also like you to create a named range for the

tax rate so this cell reference just here H2 to I2 I'd like you to name tax rate and if possible try using all of the different methods that I showed you for creating named ranges so that you can practice them once you Have your named ranges set up let's use them in some formulas so the first thing I'd like you to do is replace the reference to cell I2 in the sales tax formula in column e with the named range I'd then like you to recalculate the formulas in cell range I4 to I8 using the

named ranges instead of cell references so that should keep you busy for the next few minutes and if you'd like to see my answer then please keep Watching so the first thing I asked you to do was to create named ranges for all of the columns in the table so a quick way to do this would be to select all of the column headings Ctrl shift down arrow to select everything and then on the formulas tab choose create from selection I'm going to use the top row so my column headings as the names for each

of my ranges click on OK and let's just check that those have set in that name Box which I can see that they have I also asked you to create a named range for the sales tax as well so what we're going to do here is we're going to select cell I2 and in the name box I'm just going to call this tax underscore rate and hit enter and then I asked you to use that named range in this formula in column e so if we double click to edit the first Formula instead of I2

I want to use the Named range instead so let's delete our I2 and I'm going to start to type the word tax rate there it is in my list tab to select hit enter and double click to copy that down and then finally I asked you to do the same thing for all of these totals in column I so instead of the cell references we want to use the named ranges so total sales I use column D for this so I'm going to click them in the formula bar And delete out D3 to d52 and

we're going to use the total named range hit enter for the next one the average quantity so for this one we're using the quantity named range we're going to replace this with quantity Tab and hit enter for the next one is the minimum price per item so I'm going to select the named range delete it and this time I'm going to press the F3 key on my keyboard and select price per item and hit enter and we're going to do Exactly the same for the next one let's delete it out F3 price per item and

hit enter and then finally we're doing a count a of the customers so let's delete out this cell reference and this time we're going to use the customer name named range and hit enter number formatting plays a vital role when it comes to the readability of your worksheets when we add a value into a Cell in a spreadsheet we can decide how we want that number to look for example it might be that we want it just to look like a plain old number or maybe that number is representing monetary values and we want it

to look more like a currency or maybe we want it to show as a percentage this is where number formatting comes into play so on this worksheet I have a few numbers and I've just repeated these numbers so we kind of have a little table going on Over here and notice the column headings these are the four main types of formatting that I tend to use for numbers now before we get on to applying this formatting let's just take a look at what we mean by number formatting now we're going to be doing a lot

of work on the home ribbon in this lesson and we're going to be using this number group just here this is where you're going to find all of the tools that Relate to number formatting now notice currently my number formatting is set to General and general is the default number formatting that's applied to all cells so if you don't specify any other kind of formatting this is the formatting that you're going to get and what that basically means is if I was to type some numbers into these cells they are simply going to display with

no formatting so effectively They're going to display as I've typed them and in some scenarios that's absolutely fine you don't necessarily have to apply number formatting to every single column or range of cells if General works for you that's absolutely fine however we do have other different types of formatting that we can apply to change the look of our numbers and that's a really important point you are literally just changing the way that these numbers are displaying you're not Actually changing anything related to the underlying number and this will be Illustrated more once we start

applying different number formats and number formatting is effectively applied to the cell that contains the number as opposed to the actual number so if we take a look at this table I'm going to select all of them numbers in this first column and what we're going to do is we're going to jump up to our number formatting group click the drop down and This is going to open up a menu that shows me all the different types of number formatting that I can apply and you'll see the top one there General no specific format the

next one down is number formatting now if I click this take a look at how that changes my numbers in the worksheet I now have two decimal places after the number so if you have some long numbers and it's important that you display those decimal places this is a good Format option to choose now of course we can also customize this so maybe I want more decimal places or maybe I want less well again up in this number group notice we have these two little arrows for increased decimal and decreased decimal so I could click

once twice to take those decimal places down or I can increase them simply by clicking this button so you have quite a bit of control there now another thing to note Here and this is very much what I was saying that you're not actually changing the underlying value you're just applying formatting over the top if you take a look at the cell I currently have selected and then glance up in the formula bar the formula bar is showing me what the actual value underneath that formatting is so in the formula bar you can still see

that the value of the cell is 20 but because I've applied number formatting It looks different in the actual cell okay so just bear that in mind let's apply some currency formatting to this second column we're going to jump up to our drop down and go to currency again this changes the look and feel of my numbers this time I'm getting the Pound currency symbol in front of all of my numbers and again I have two decimal places if I wanted to take those down again I could or I could increase them now another Thing

I could do here is I could change the currency symbol that I'm using so I'm in the UK so by default my Excel and my Windows PC is set up to use British pounds now if I want to change the currency symbol that I'm using what I would need to do here is either click the drop down and go down to more number formats alternatively I can click the diagonal Arrow to take me into the format cells dialog box and the currency section And from here I can also adjust those decimal places and also change

the currency symbol that I'm using and we have pretty much all currency symbols in here so it's just a case of scrolling through and finding the one that you want to use let's now take a look at accounting format I'm going to select all of these cells click the drop down and this time we're going to go for accounting now take a look at this one because it Is slightly different from the currency format again this is just adding a currency symbol but notice that with this format the currency symbol is pushed all the way

over to the left hand side of the cell and this is the main difference between accounting format and currency accounting format was really created for the accounting industry and in the accounting industry they generally tend to have to read down lots of line items of numbers So to make that a little bit easier accounting format moves that currency symbol out of the way but it also makes sure that all of the decimal places are lined up so it's much easier to read down a list of values and then finally on the end here we want

to apply some percentage formatting now this is a little bit of a strange one if I highlight all of these numbers click the drop down and select percentage look at what I get here that Isn't really what I was hoping for even if I decrease the decimal places I'm still getting figures that I wasn't expecting so let's undo a couple of times because what I want these to say is basically 10 20 30 so on and so forth now if you have your numbers written out like this and you simply try to apply percentage format

over the top you're not going to get what you're expecting in order for that to work you would need To break these percentages down and divide them by a hundred effectively to get 10 when I apply the percentage format I would need to have this written out as 0.10 [Music] now if I apply percentage format to that and take those decimal places down it gives me 10 and an issue that I find that comes up all the time is that people have numbers written out like this in a spreadsheet and then they're Not sure how

to get all of those numbers quickly converted into percentages so we can fix this using a simple formula trick all we need to do is select the cell D5 divide it by a hundred and that gives us the value that we're looking for we can then double click to copy this down and then when we apply the percentage format take those decimal places down we get exactly what it is that we're looking for okay so that's one way that you can do this Another way is that you can simply type the percentage sign in when

you're typing the number so if I want 10 in the cell if I type in 10 and then add the percentage sign it's going to keep it on 10 and oddly it changes the number formatting of that cell to percentage so just be aware of that if you have numbers already in a spreadsheet and you try to apply percentage formatting quite often that's not going to work so you either need to Type the percentage sign or add a formula that divides it by a hundred now some of these other buttons that we have up in

this number group if we click this drop down this is just a quick way for me to switch between three currencies I use most often we have the percentage symbol just here that will quickly apply the percent style and I also have a comma style here as well and you'd use this if you had a longer number so let's say I've got 2 500 written in the cell if I want to add a comma to that I can simply click comma Style it's going to add the comma give me a couple of decimal places I

can get rid of those if I want to but I now have comma style formatting applied to that number now of course when we click in this drop down we have a whole host of other formats in here as well and we're going to cover the next three short date long day and time in The next lesson some of these others you won't use as often so things like fractions scientific format and then we also have text and as we've seen if we click more number formats that's going to jump us into our format cells

dialog box which gives us access to yet another menu item which is custom because what you can do from here is create your own custom formats now this is outside of the scope of this beginner's course But just be aware that that is something you can do when you move up towards your more intermediate and advanced skills in the previous lesson we started to take a look at the different types of number formatting that you can apply to values in cells and in this lesson I just want to shift the focus specifically to applying date

and time formatting because there are a couple of little things that are really useful to know now if you take a look at This little table you'll see that I've got three columns short date long date and time and in this short day column take a look at what I have in here I have some seemingly random numbers and this is something you'll come across fairly frequently in Excel and I know for sure that when I first started learning Excel and I was sent a spreadsheet that had all of these weird numbers where dates should

be I was Super confused as to why that was happening now if you do see numbers where you're expecting dates all this means is that you have the incorrect number formatting applied to your column or the range of cells so what is this number well basically all dates in Excel are numbers and according to excel the start of the universe was the first of January 1900. Excel considers that date to be day number one and you can see that if I Type in the first of the first 1900 and hit enter if I change this

to General formatting you can see it showing me the number one because that is day one and so the numbers that you see here are basically the number of days past the 1st of January 1900 and because I have General formatting applied to these cells it's showing the number as opposed to the date so the easiest way to fix this is simply to jump up to the drop down and then Either choose short date format or long date formats now I'm going to choose short date and that immediately converts those to the correct date format

and of course if I want to display these in the long date format I can select my cells again and this time I think I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl shift down to make that selection up to the drop down and this time long date and there I have that long date format applied again note the formula Bar even though we've changed the way that this date looks in the cells the underlying number is still the original date now as most of you can probably tell I am in the UK and the way

that we write our dates is a little bit different to other parts of the world we write the date as the first of January 2021 whereas a lot of countries write the date as January the 1st 2021 now for me I do a lot of work with American clients so what I'll normally make sure I do is that I switch my date format around so that it's not confusing for the people who are watching the video and again this is something that you need to do in your Windows settings you need to select the correct

region and then make sure that Excel is set up to use the region that you have set in your Windows settings so if you take a look at the top section here it says match Microsoft Windows another thing to look out for here is if You open up the number formatting window you can also change your Locale for dates as well so I have mine set to English United Kingdom but if I wanted to change that to English United States I could select that and notice it flips those dates round the other way so now

effectively we have the month first the day second and then the year so just be aware of that Locale setting as well when you're using things like dates now the final thing to show you here is the Time formatting and again if you have a bunch of times written out in your spreadsheet you may choose to format these in any number of different ways so if we click the drop down I currently just have the regular time formatting applied which uses a 24-hour clock and it shows me the hours minutes and seconds if I want

to modify this once again I can click the arrow to jump into my number format options and I can choose Any of these that I have in the list so maybe I want it to display as a 12 hour clock with AM or PM at the end so I can select that number format and apply it and that's how that's going to look and if I really wanted to get granular and customize exactly how these time and dates are looking that is again when I would go to custom and I would either select one of

the formats in this custom list or I can create my own from scratch As I said outside of the scope of this beginners course but just be aware that you do have the ability to do that another thing that's worth noting here is that you don't necessarily always have to apply formatting to values within sales you can apply formatting to empty columns cells and rows as well so if I select these three columns which currently have no formatting applied if I select all three of them and I switch these to short date format It means

that when I type something into here it's going to do its best to convert it into a date formatting worksheets not only makes your data come alive and look a lot more interesting it also makes your data a lot easier to read for example take a look at what I have on this worksheet I have some data but currently it's not really in the greatest format it's going to be very hard for anyone looking at this to decipher it and understand it so We could probably do with formatting this a little bit better so that

it's easy to interpret so let's take a look at some of the utilities that we have available in Excel which can help us with this now looking at this data the first thing I can see here that doesn't look too great is that the column headings where we have date description and amount are kind of cut off halfway and I can see here that that is because row 7 isn't wide enough to accommodate That information and you'll see this again very frequently when you import data in from other systems sometimes these columns and these rows

can end up kind of collapsed up like this so that you can't see the values in them now this is something that's very easy to fix all we need to do here to increase this row height is hover our Mouse over the dividing line between rows seven and eight and double click and that is effectively going to invoke autofit in Excel and it will adjust the height of that row to accommodate the height of the values contained within it's also worth noting that aside from that double click you can also access the autofit options from

the ribbon so let's just say I had a few rows which were kind of collapsed up like this let's just manually make this look even Messier what I could do here is I could select all of the rows Like so up to the Home tab across into the cells group and we have this format drop down now notice here at the top here we have two options that relate to the row height I can specify an exact row height or I can choose to auto fit the row height so if I click this option it's

going to basically do the same thing and autofit all of those rows if I wanted to make each of these rows a very specific size again I could go to format row height And I could enter in my own row height so let's put 25 in there when I click on OK you can see it's going to widen out those rows now I don't really want them that large so let's undo to take us back to the regular row height now this works the same for columns so you can see here that column B currently

that description is kind of cut off I can double click to widen out that column or if I want it to be very Specific about how wide I wanted each column I could select all of the columns go to format and this time I want to choose the column width and maybe I want these to be 50 each click on OK and I get three equally sized columns let's undo those changes so now that we've seen how we can kind of modify the row and column height and width let's take a look at the actual

data now in the First Column here I have some dates I can see that those are Showing us numbers so they don't have the correct number formatting applied Ctrl shift down arrow to select everything and then a quick way that I could do this would be to press Ctrl 1 to jump me into my format cells dialog and then I can go in and I can apply date format I'm going to choose the top format there click on OK and that formatting has been applied now the description that looks to be okay I do want

to apply some more Formatting to these amounts so Ctrl shift down control 1 and now I can choose either currency or accounting format and I think I'm going to use currency for these I'm happy with two decimal places and a pound symbol so let's simply click ok to apply that formatting now this isn't looking too bad but I could make this look even better by applying more formatting in its current state it's It's readable definitely but there isn't much of a distinction between those column headings and the actual values the information underneath and it doesn't

really look particularly interesting or engaging so let's change that I'm going to select the column headings and then we're going to go up to the Home tab and into the font formatting group and this is where you're going to find all of your options to change the look and feel of the font So the first thing I'm going to do here is I'm going to choose a different font to use for these headings and I want something a little bit Bolder so let's go with Ariel black I'm going to increase the size of that font

from 11 to 12 and don't forget if you want to make minor adjustments to that font size you have the increased font size button just here and the decrease font size Button as well now I could choose to make this bold I'm not going to do that Because it's already bold what about italics yeah that looks pretty good I could add an underline I think in this case that is a little bit of Overkill but what I do want to do is I want to make the background of this heading a different color so for

that I can click the drop down and choose a color from the palette now the colors that you see in your palette underneath this theme colors heading are dictated by the theme that You're using in Excel and we have a whole lesson dedicated to themes so I'm not going to delve too much into this right now but I'm using the standard office theme and these are the colors that come with the theme of course if I don't like any of those I can also choose from a small standard color palette or I could go to

more colors and really get very granular about the colors that I'm choosing now for this I'm going to stick with my Theme colors I think I'm going to make this let's make it a dark green color and now I'm going to change the font color as well so that it stands out to White so just with a few small formatting tweaks we can really see the difference between those column titles and the rest of the data now something else I might want to do in here to make this look a little bit neater is maybe

start adding some borders so the first thing I would need to do here is select The cells that I want to put a border around and then I can either jump up to the borders drop down and choose what type of Border I would like you don't necessarily have to have a border around every single cell you can choose if you want it running across the bottom across the top so on and so forth you can also choose the color of the border from here and also the Border style so whether you want a solid

line a double line a dotted line so on and so forth now I always Find when I'm working with borders it's much easier just to jump into more borders option which is going to take us into format cells and that border tab from here I can select what I want so I'm going to say I want a solid line in fact let's make that a bit thinner I want it to be the same color as the heading so we're going to choose that forest green color and from here I can choose which borders I want

to apply and we have three presets at the top so If I click outline you can see in the preview window it's going to put a solid fill green border around the outside of where I'm selected if I decide I don't like that I can click the none preset and then maybe go in and choose some different options so maybe I want to border across the top of the cell and cross the bottom but I don't want anything around each cell now in my case I do want to border around everything so I'm going to

choose the none preset just To get rid of all of those and I'm going to say I want an outline border and also an inside border now if I click on OK you can see how that affects my data to me this makes my data not only a lot easier to read but also a lot more interesting to look at format painter is one of those great efficiency Tools in Excel what format painter enables you to do is quickly copy formatting from one place and reuse it in another place so the very quick Example that

we're going to walk through here is using the table that we formatted in the last lesson if you remember we applied numerous pieces of formatting to make this table a lot more readable than it originally was and if you take a look on the right hand side we basically have the unformatted version of this table and what we effectively want to do is make this table on the right the one That currently isn't formatted look like the table on the left and of course we could do that by going through and and reapplying the formatting

so I could select the heading here I could go up to the font group I could change the font style change the font size make it italic change the background color change the font color but that's quite a lot of clicking around that I'm having to do and whilst that is only a few seconds worth of clicking over time that Is going to add up and why bother doing that when there is a one click option if I want to take the formatting that already exists in this worksheet for example the formatting applied to the

column headings and copy it somewhere else I can simply use the format painter all I need to do is make sure that I'm clicked on a cell that contains the formatting that I want to copy across now I want to copy across this formatting to effectively three Different cells date description and amount and one thing to note here is that you don't necessarily have to select three cells in the first table you can just select one as long as that one cell contains the formatting that you want to use so all I need to do

now is go up to the Home tab and in the clipboard group I have a format painter button now if we click this this effectively toggles on the format painter you can see that it's Toggled on in the clipboard group also notice that my cursor has changed to a paintbrush and the cell where I'm copying the formatting from now has marching ants around the outside so now all I need to do is take my cursor and effectively paint over the cells where I want to apply the formatting so we're going to click and drag and

then when I Let Go like magic that formatting has been Applied and I haven't had to go through all of those different steps now one thing you'll notice is that as soon as I've finished painting my formatting format painter deactivates and my cursor goes back to a regular cursor so effectively when you click the format painter once you can only use it once before it deactivates now what if I have lots of formatting that I need to apply for example let's say that we have this item highlighted in bold And maybe I want to highlight

numerous items in the table on the right hand side in bold well what I would need to do then is Select my bold formatting I can select the entire thing or I can choose just one cell but instead of clicking once on the format painter I want to double click and that means that I can use it multiple times so I can paint and then notice it doesn't deactivate I can paint again And again and carry on going until I choose to deactivate and to deactivate the format painter you can either click on the format

painter button again or alternatively a quicker way is to press the Escape key on your keyboard now notice as I've copied those over it's also copied over the Border formatting as well so I want everything to have a border so let's select a cell that looks like the formatting I want to use let's click Format painter and I'm going to paint over everything in here and there we go also remember that even though we've used the same table of data you can use format painter on pretty much anything if I have a cell up here

and that cell is an orange color and I decide that I want to use that somewhere else I can select the cell click format painter and then swipe it wherever I want to use it in this exercise we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in This section related to applying formatting I'm going to start out with applying number formats so for this we're going to be working on the formatting worksheet and the first thing I'd like you to do is apply the short date number formatting to column A I'd then like

you to apply accounting format to column C and also percentage format to the value in cell I for I'd then like you to complete this worksheet by using a formula to complete the sales tax in Column D and again I want you to make sure that you're applying accounting formatting there and then finally use a formula to complete the total in column e and apply accounting formats once you've done that I'd like you to make this data look a little bit more interesting and give it some structure by applying some more formatting so I'd like

you first to apply formatting to the title where it says client invoices and I'd like you to apply bold light Gray background fill and font size 14 points I'd then like you to format all of the column headings with bold and a light green background fill and then finally I'd like you to apply borders around all of the data so you're looking for the all borders option but I want you to make sure that that border the line color is dark green see how you get on with that and if you'd like to see my

answer then please keep watching so the first thing I asked you to do here was To apply the short date format to the dates that we have in column A so let's select everything Ctrl shift down arrow up to the Home tab and we're going to choose the short date format next I asked you to apply a counting format to everything in column C TRL shift down arrow and from the drop down we're going to choose accounting format and if yours has come up as dollars as opposed to pounds then don't worry about that too

Much next I asked you to apply percentage format to the value in cell I2 so let's select it this time I'm going to do it a slightly different way let's press Ctrl 1 to go into format cells and I'm going to choose percentage format and just take those decimal places down so that it displays as 15 next I asked you just to complete this table so we need to use a formula to work out the sales tax So this is going to be a simple sum calculation of the amount multiplied by the sales tax in

I2 F4 to lock that cell close the bracket control enter let's double click to copy that down and then our final sum calculation is a simple addition so we're going to add the amount to the sales tax control enter and fill down next I asked you to apply some formatting to this worksheet to give it a little bit of structure so the First thing I wanted you to do was to apply formatting to the title so we're going to select the client invoices row we're going to change the font size to 14. we're going to

make it bold and we're going to fill the background with a light gray next I asked you to format the headings of each of the columns and for this I asked you to change it to a light green background and bold font the final thing I asked you to do was apply Dark green borders around the outside of this data so what I can do here is press Ctrl a to select everything jump up to my borders drop down and the first thing I want to do is make sure that I've got the correct line

color selected so I'm going to choose a dark green color and then we're going to go back and apply all borders we've made the accompanying exercise files for this tutorial available for Free just click the link below in the video details to get these hello everyone and a very warm welcome to this course on Excel 2021 intermediate my name is Deborah Ashby and I'm a Microsoft it trainer and I specialize in the design delivery and facilitation of Microsoft courses both online and in the classroom and I've been working in the IT industry for about 26

years now which makes me feel extremely old and I've been an I.T Trainer for 16 years I've also been a certified Excel geek since 1996. so hopefully everything I've just said there qualifies me to be sitting in front of you and hosting this course for you today and what an amazing course we have for you this course is designed for the latest Standalone version Excel 2021 and if you're thinking to yourself well what does that mean I don't really understand how these versions work anymore then you are not alone basically The Standalone versions are for

people who haven't subscribed to office 365. with a monthly Office 365 subscription Microsoft push all of the new updates to excel out to you automatically but for those people who don't have an Office 365 subscription in general you need to wait for the next Standalone release in order to receive those newer features and that is exactly what we have here so Excel 2021 is pretty much in line with the current version of Excel for office 365. so all of those new features that may be your friends or other colleagues who work elsewhere have been talking

about you now have access to those in this latest version and we're going to be looking at all of the new stuff as well as some of the older intermediate skills in this course so let's dive in and take a look at what we're going to be covering over the next few hours well we're going to start out with an Introduction that is pretty much what we're doing now and we're then going to move on to our first section designing better spreadsheets so in this section I'm going to go through with you some really important

golden rules when it comes to spreadsheet design which is going to really help keep you organized we're then going to dive straight into the good stuff logical functions so things like ifs nested IFS someif's countifs average ifs all of those really Useful logical functions we're then going to move into everybody's favorite lookup functions so if you don't know your vlookup from your hlookup then hopefully we're going to solve that mystery for you today we're also going to take a look at more complex lookups using things like index and match and we're going to be taking

a look at our first brand new function for Excel 2021 and that is X lookup and x match after lookups we're going to move Straight into advanced sorting and filtering and there's a couple of new formulas in that section as well we'll then take a look at those oh so important date and time functions before moving on to our section on preparing data for analysis and this is a really important section where you're going to learn some really valuable skills so again lots of new formulas to learn in that section as well as a step-by-step

guide as to how to clean your data and Prepare it for our next subject which is Pivot tables one of the most useful things in Excel when it comes to analyzing data we're going to completely demystify them take all the hard work out of them and I'm going to show you just how simple they are when you break them down we're also going to take a look at pivot charts and how they work with pivot tables and then we're going to move on to adding interaction to our pivot tables and pivot charts using Slicers and

timelines then the extension of the last three topics is really interactive dashboards this is kind of where we bring everything together and create ourselves a really nice dashboard to show high level statistics we're then going to move into formula auditing so we're going to take a look at some of the errors that you can get in Excel I'm going to show you how you can identify them and also how you can fix them we're also going to go through how you can use Some of the really useful features in Excel to audit your formulas we'll

then move on to data validation I'm going to show you quite a few different examples of the different types of validation that you can add into your spreadsheets and we're also going to take a look at a more complex example of custom validation and then in the final section we're going to explore excel's what-if analysis tools so things like goal seek one variable Data tables two variable data tables and of course scenario manager and then finally we'll just close out the course and say our goodbyes for now so lots on the agenda so before we

begin let's just run over the structure of this course this course contains 15 sections and 70 lessons and each lesson contains a video demonstration or tutorial that is 5 to 15 minutes long and you'll find all of the files that I use in the Demonstrations available in the course files folder for you to download so if you want to follow along with me just look at the file name that I'm using in the video and you'll be able to find the corresponding course file in the course files folder and at the end of each section

you'll find a downloadable exercise that you can use to practice the skills that you've learned in the section along with quizzes to test your knowledge even Further so plenty of resources and ways that you can practice so with all that said it is just about time to get started the only prerequisite this course is that you have a copy of excel 2021 downloaded and installed on your PC if you want to grab yourself a coffee or some other kind of drink then please do that now because we're just about ready to dive into the first

session once again my name is Deb and I am super excited to be your host For this course so throughout this section we're going to start to take a look at some of the things that I mentioned in the previous lesson when we were talking about the golden rules of spreadsheet design and the first one I'm going to talk to you about is how to use cell Styles in your workbooks to help improve readability and I always find that cell style seems to be one of those things that I don't see a lot of people

using But can be extremely helpful particularly if you're going to be sharing your workbook with a lot of other people cell Stars effectively tell people what type of cell they're using so what exactly do I mean by that well I have my spreadsheet just here we have some basic data on it just some invoice numbers for some clients I have an amount column I have the amount of vat so v80 is 20 of the amount and then I have a simple sum calculation in column F to work out the total of that invoice now if

this is a worksheet that I'm sharing with other people in my team maybe other people are going to be adding more invoices onto the bottom of this and I want to make it super clear to everybody who's using this spreadsheet which cells they can type into which cells contain formulas which cells are headings so on and so forth and I can do that by using color in the form of cell Styles so if we go up to The Home tab we have a cell Styles drop down and we have numerous different default cell styles that

we can apply to different cells in our worksheet now it's worth noting that the colors that you see here particularly these theme cell Styles at the bottom are all based on the theme that you currently have in use in Excel so I'm using the standard office theme and this is the color palette that comes with this theme and All of the cell stars are divided down into different categories and all this really is is formatting so you'll see as I hover over some of these you can just see behind where I have this drop down

the cell is changing depending on which one of these I've selected and of course if you don't like the colors or the format of these or you have a very specific color palette that you need to use at your organization all of these can be modified and updated to reflect Your own colors for example if I didn't like the way that this calculation cell style looked I could right click I can go into modify and I can change the format of that particular cell Style so you can change these now we're not going to do

that right now I just want to show you how in general I would use these in this type of worksheet so if I take a look at my data I want to let people know which cells they need to input information into and that is going To be all of these cells just here so other people will need to enter in the invoice number the date the client and the amount but vat and total are calculated using formulas so I want to denote these cells just here as input cells so we're going to select them

go up to cell Styles and I'm going to choose this one just here input now it might be that you definitely do want to go in and change this formatting a lot of people don't necessarily like This orange background fill with this blue writing so if you don't like it just remember you can change that now these other two columns contain formulas or calculations so I'm going to select this group of cells and I'm going to let people know that these are calculation cells so simply by the use of cell Styles it's fairly obvious to

see which ones are input and which ones are calculations now this vat rate over here I'm going to let people input whatever They need to input into here because that might change so I'm going to denote that as an input cell as well and I have a title at the top so maybe I want to select these cells and denote that as a heading to and I could carry on going I can even create my own new use cell styles from here as well so if you want to create your own you can definitely do

that also and then what I would generally tend to do is create a welcome sheet at the beginning which has a Legend on it that explains what these cell styles are so I might put something like input cell let's just add two of these that we're using and I might put something like input values into these cells and then I might have calculation cells just so it's super clear for anybody looking at this worksheet so That is basically how you use cell Styles it's simply formatting which lets other people know what type of data goes

into the worksheet and where they should be typing one of the golden rules that we discussed in the first lesson of this section was how we can control data input because again if you've spent a lot of time working on a spreadsheet and you've put together some really nice complex Formulas if you send that out to a group of people who maybe don't have the level of skill that you do when working with Excel you might find that it comes back to you full of errors and all that hard work we put in has been

undone or it might be that you send this out to other people and they start entering in invalid information into the spreadsheet so we can put in some safeguards which will help keep our spreadsheets as error free as possible so the two that I'm Going to demonstrate to you in this lesson are data validation and also protection so let's take a look at the data that we're going to be using now this is just a very simple list of employees I have the employee ID the employee name the department they work in and then their

salary in column D and what I have over on the right hand side are actually a couple of formulas now currently these formulas are showing me n a errors that's okay that's going to Be fixed in a moment but if we click on Cell I4 for example and take a look in the formula bar you can see that I have an index and match formula in there now don't worry if you have no clue what this is doing we are going to cover index and match in a couple of sections time what we're basically doing

here is a lookup so what I want to be able to do is just above here in cell I3 I want to be able to have the employee name and then have these index and match formulas Return the department that that employee Works in and also their salary so the formula is basically going to look at the information in cell I3 it's going to compare it in the table it's going to find the employee and then it's going to return the department and the salary for the employee that we've selected now if I give this

spreadsheet to a colleague and their manager says to them find out for me the department and the salary for Laurie May so the employee comes up here They type in Lori May and hit enter and it doesn't bring anything back now the reason why it's not bringing back the correct information is because the employee has spelled Lorry incorrectly it should be l-o-r-i so instead of that employee going back to their manager and saying couldn't find any details or the spreadsheet wasn't working which could reflect badly on you if you put the spreadsheet together you want

to make it So it's impossible for them to select the wrong name and we can do that by using a data validation drop down list so what we're going to do here is we're going to click in cell I3 let's go up to the data Tab and into the data tools group now if we click data validation and data validation again it's going to open up this little dialog box and we want to be on the settings tab if we click the drop down underneath the Layout you can see that there are a few different

options in this menu now the one that we want is list we want to create a drop down list of all the employee names so that other people can select them once we've selected list we then need to provide the source for our list so what are the names that are going into this list now my names are listed in column B in this table and they are all unique names now I'm going to show you how you would do this if Your list items weren't unique a bit later on but for now let's not

get too far ahead of ourselves these are all unique so in the source field I'm simply going to select all of the employee names these are going to be in my drop down list and click on OK now notice that I get an in cell drop down which is listing out all of those names so now if the same employee wants to find this information for Lori they Can simply select them from the menu and now these formulas are set up in such a way that they're going to look at the value in cell I3

and return the relevant information from the table so simply by adding a drop down list we're controlling what's input into this particular cell and ensuring that our worksheet is a lot less prone to errors so drop down lists a fantastic way of controlling what's going into your spreadsheet now with all that said what If I want to go a stage further maybe I need to send this worksheet out to other people I want them to be able to select an employee from this list but I don't want them to be able to edit any of

these formulas currently anybody can jump in here and start making changes to these index and match formulas but I really want to lock them down so that they don't get broken now before I do that let's just make this a bit clearer I'm just going to add In employee into here and I'm going to use my format painter just to copy across that formatting so everything's nice and neat so what I'm going to do here is I'm basically going to lock down these two cells so that they can't be edited and leave everything else on

this worksheet editable and this is what we call protecting cells now the thing that I always found slightly confusing about this is that it feels like it works a little bit backwards The concept you have to understand is that by default in Excel or in a worksheet every cell is locked now this is the part which always used to confuse me because I used to think to myself well if every cell is locked how can I go into every cell and just start typing well it's because the Locking doesn't take effect until you protect the

worksheet so the first step here is to select the cells that can be edited and then unlock them so it might be that I Want this cell to be editable so that people can select employees from the drop down and maybe I want the table information to be editable as well so I'm going to select this cell I'm going to hold down control I'm just going to select all of the information in the table right click the mouse and go into format cells remember you can press the shortcut key of control 1. now in here

we have a protection Tab and notice by default locked is checked and That is because all cells are locked by default now we want to unlock these cells so let's remove that check mark and click on OK now for all of this to take effect I need to protect my worksheet so up to the review tab into the protect group and we want to select protect sheet now I'm going to put a password on this worksheet but notice underneath we have a whole list of basically Exceptions to this rule so I could choose other things

that I want to allow users to do in this worksheet So currently I'm only going to allow them to select locked and locked cells meaning they can click on the cell that is absolutely fine now let's put a password on here and then we need to confirm that password so now what you should find is that I can still do things like select Employees from this drop down list I can make changes to cells over here because those are also unlocked but if I try and change these formulas these two cells I'm going to get

this message the seller chart you're trying to change is on a protected sheet so effectively I've protected both of those formulas from editing and again this is something that is invaluable if you want to keep your spreadsheets as error free as possible now if you want to unprotect your sheet Once you protected it just click the unprotect sheet button and you'll need to know what the password is in order to unprotect now that I've done that if I go back in I can now edit these formulas again something that I didn't actually include in my

golden rules for spreadsheet design and probably should have if I'm honest is making your spreadsheets easy to navigate by adding things like navigation buttons and links we really Want to make our spreadsheets easy to navigate as well as easy to understand and if you have a particularly large workbook that contains lots and lots of different worksheets you want to make sure that users have a quick way of jumping to the different worksheets and navigating efficiently between the different tabs so let me show you a couple of examples and then you can have a think about

how you might Implement these so I've got This workbook here we have quite a few different worksheets running across the bottom and it might be if I go to the sales data worksheet maybe I want to have a button on here which says something like click here to see analysis and what I effectively want this button to do is when the user clicks on it it's going to jump them to the analysis worksheet so they can see the pivot table and the pivot chart that's been created based off of this Data now I can implement

this in a few different ways and this is really a stylistic choice which you're going to make yourself I could just add a piece of text so if I click just here and I think in this example this is going to be a bit easier if I turn grid lines back on temporarily I could just add a text-based link so maybe I want to type in please click here to see analysis something like that it doesn't Look particularly interesting but it does work I can select this text and I can create a hyperlink to the

analysis worksheet now we can create hyperlinks in a couple of different ways I could go to the insert Tab and all the way over in the links group we have a link button just here keyboard shortcut Control Plus k now this is going to open up the insert hyperlink dialog box and there are tons of different things you can link to from Here I could link to an external website I could think to an email or I can link to a place in this document and that's exactly what I want to do so I'm going

to select place in this document now notice it brings up on the right hand side all of the different worksheets that I have in this workbook so it's very simple for me to just select the worksheet that I need which is analysis in this case and I can even Choose where I want their cursor to land on this particular worksheet so I'm going to leave this on A1 what I could even do up here is I could add a screen tip so that when the user hovers over this piece of text it's going to show

a little pop-up box that tells them something like where this link is going to take them so maybe um I just want to put jump to [Music] Analysis worksheet something like that and click on OK so I've selected my worksheet I've selected the cell I've added a screen tip let's click on OK and now this is a hyperlink notice as I hover my mouse over it my cursor changes to a little hand icon and there is that screen tip popping up so if I click this link it jumps me to the analysis worksheet and notice

that my Cursor is in cell A1 by default so that is the first method I could use it works but it's not particularly interesting so how can we make this a bit more interesting well we could create something that looks more like a clickable button and we would do this simply using shapes so up on the insert ribbon let's go to shapes and I can choose any one of these now I think I'm going to use this one here the rounded rectangle Let's grab that tool my cursor has changed to a small cross and I

can simply draw something which kind of resembles a button now of course we have all of our usual formatting options on the shape format contextual ribbon so if I want to change the color of that I can maybe I want to change it to something which matches the spreadsheet colors a little bit better I can change the shape outline let's give it a dark green outline and then I can Add some text now with shapes if you've got them selected you can simply start typing to add some text so let's say please click here to

see analysis I don't particularly like the font that's in use in this particular template so let's change that let's go to the home ribbon I'm going to change this to let's go with Ariel and I need to make this a bit bigger and I also might want to move that text Into the middle and of course you can play around with this as much as you like you might want to make the font slightly bigger you might even want to add some shape effects to this to make it look even more like a button so

if I was to add something like that that kind of gives it more of a button look so now that I have my button created I can simply click on the shape I could go up to insert and choose link From there or I could right click my mouse and go to link it's going to pop up the same dialog box we want to place in document we want it to link to the analysis workbook but this time let's choose a different cell to link to so I'm going to say B 10 I could add

a screen tip if I wanted to I'm not going to in this case and click on OK so now we have a clickable button when I Click on this again it's going to jump me to the workbook take a look at where my cursor is cell B10 and personally for me that looks a lot more effective than just the text let's take a look at one more example and this time I'm going to use something which was a reasonably recent addition into Excel I say reasonably recent they've been around for the past few years and

that is using icons you can set up links on pictures icons 3D models text shapes pretty much anything you want so if we click on icons on the insert ribbon maybe instead of a shape I want to use one of the icons from the Icon Library so I'm actually going to search for the word analysis and let's just use this icon and insert it I can put it somewhere down here I might want to add some text to it to make it super obvious as to what it's going to do but I think you get

the idea let's Just set up our link this time I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut of control K to open that dialog box we're linking to the analysis workbook and let's choose uh let's choose A5 this time I will add a screen tip for this one because it is simply an icon it's not so obvious jump to analysis click on OK OK again and now this icon when we click on it is going to jump us to the relevant worksheet now as I said you could insert a picture and Set this up in exactly

the same way you could insert a 3D model a different type of shape lots of different ways that you can create hyperlinks one thing I find that's sometimes quite nice to do particularly if I have a workbook structure like this is sometimes I like to have just a little icon in the corner which will enable users to jump back to the how to use page so again I might choose to use an icon and let's just search for a home icon just here let's Use this one of course I can change the color of this

icon so that it matches my worksheet might want to make that a bit smaller I could place that in the corner or somewhere else on my worksheet and I could copy this across to all of my worksheets simply by doing Ctrl C and Ctrl V I might want to place this in the corner of all of them and then I'm going to set up a link Ctrl k which is going to jump me to the how to Use page let's add a screen tip that says jump to how to use click on OK click on

OK again when we click it it's going to jump us to that page so a few different methods there for creating clickable buttons to help you navigate around your worksheets and workbook okay in this section of the course we're going to dive into the magical world of Using logical functions in Excel because logical functions are some of the most important functions that you can know or have in your toolkit when you're working in Excel particularly if you're an intermediate user and what logical functions help us do is basically make decisions now there are quite a

few different logical functions you'll find them on the formulas Tab In The Logical group of the function library and you can see all of them sitting in there and We're going to use quite a few of these throughout the balance of this section but what I wanted to make sure that we do in this first lesson is just do a quick recap on some of those Basics just to make sure that we're all on the same page and we're starting from the same at Baseline because it's really important to understand the concept behind how logical

functions work before we can move on to do a more complex calculations using things like ifs Sumifs countifs and nested if statements so let's talk about logical statements in their most basic form first of all and we're going to do this using an example because it's always the best way to visualize this so on this first worksheet I have a very small table and this lists out some expenses so we have the person's name in here we have the total of their expenses and what I want to do is work out if an approval is

required Now we have some additional information next to this that says expenses over the following amount must be approved so if the expense is over a thousand dollars then it needs to be approved by a manager so I can work this out by using a very simple logical statement now what exactly are logical statements well it's basically like performing a test so in this particular example if we take the first expense just here I would want to construct a logical statement that says If this value in cell B5 is greater than or equal to this

value in cell G5 then it needs to be approved and I want to perform that same test on all of these expense invoices now when we're doing things like this we use what we call operators and you can see I've just pasted in a little picture of a table that shows different operators that you might be using in your logical statements so things like equal to greater than Less than greater than or equal to so on and so forth so let's do this first one just here we're going to type in equals to let Excel

know we're about to do a formula and this is very straightforward we perform our test so is the value in cell B5 greater than or equal to we're going to say that because if it's a thousand dead on it needs to be approved is it greater than or equal to the value In cell G5 now remember if you want to copy this formula down we don't want that figure in cell G5 moving so we need to lock it by pressing the F4 key and making it absolute now if I hit enter just here it's given

me a result of false and what I can do is I can now copy that formula down and I can see here that all of the results showing us true are the invoices that are greater than or equal to a thousand And need to be approved now notice here that all of my answers are either true or false and if you perform a logical calculation in this particular way using these operators the output is always going to be true or false now that might be absolutely fine for whatever it is that you're doing but sometimes

it might be that you want to make this more meaningful so instead of it saying false just here I might want it to say okay instead of saying true just here I might Want it to say approval so effectively what I might want to do is attribute meaning to the true and false values and I'm going to show you how you can kind of move on from this and do that in the next lesson but for now let's just get this concept of logical formulas straight in our head we perform a test now because of

the way that I've set this up if this threshold in cell G5 was now to change so maybe this now changes to 1200 notice that all of my results Update if I was to change this to 500 and hit enter everything is now true okay so a really nice effective way of putting this formula in and making it Dynamic and easy to update now just to go back to changing these values and adding meaning to them in order to do that instead of just having a basic logical function we would need to turn this into

an if statement and that's basically what an if statement allows us to do it's basically this same logical Formula but it allows us to attribute more meaning to the results and we're going to cover if in a lot more detail in the next lesson but let me just show you how we would change these values now I'm just going to delete these out now what we're going to do is we're going to wrap basically our logical statement inside an if statement now notice here it says check whether a condition is met and returns one value

if true and another value is false So the first argument here is our logical test so our logical test is pretty much what we just did is this value greater than or equal to this value F4 to lock press comma to move on to the next argument this is where we can attribute meaning to the true or false result so it says value if true I can now Define what I want it to say if the result is true so if the result is true Effectively the number is greater than a thousand and it has

to be approved so in quote marks because text and formulas must always be in quote marks I want it to say approval comma if the value in the cell is false I don't want it to do anything I just want it to say okay let's close the bracket so I've attributed meaning to the true and false results Let's hit enter and I can now double click to copy that down and it's a lot clearer for me to see which invoices need to be approved so simply by adding in that if statement we've changed the rather

generic true or false output to something that's more meaningful and easier to understand and that's basically what an if does for us let's look at a few more examples of if in action now in this first table again very small table we have some test Scores so got some student names and we've got the score they achieved in a test and the pass Mark is 85. so I want to create an if statement that says if the value in this cell is greater than or equal to the value in this cell 85 I want a

result of pass if it's not I want a result of fail so again we're going to use if our logical test is if the value in B4 is greater than or equal to the value in H3 we're going to copy this down so F4 to lock If that is true then they have passed hooray if it's false then unfortunately they have failed close the bracket I'm going to do a control enter to stay in the same cell copy that down and I get my results so much more meaningful than simply true or false let's take

a look at another example of if and we're going to add in a little bit more complexity just here so in this second table we have some products we have the weight in kilos and then we have the price for Those products and I'm actually just going to change these to Dollars just to keep everything in this spreadsheet consistent now what we're going to say here is that if the weight of the product is greater than or equal to 30 kilos then there's going to be a 20 shipping fee and that shipping fee is going

to be 20 of the price so let's construct our if what is our logical test well if the weight is greater than or equal To 30 kilos again F4 to lock now what do we want it to do if that is true so if the product is greater than or equal to 30 kilos well there's going to be a 20 shipping fee so our True Result is going to be a calculation because we want it to work out that shipping fee so if it's true we want to do the price multiplied by 20 percent F4

to lock comma if it's false there's going to be no shipping fee so we're Going to put a zero on the end there close our bracket Ctrl enter to stay in the same cell and if I copy this down I should find that the only two products that have a shipping fee are the ones that are greater than or equal to 30 kilos and this amount should be 20 of the actual price so we can incorporate formulas into our logical if statements as well now I just want to finish off this lesson by running through

a couple of other basic Logical statements and that is and and or now what and allows you to do is basically perform two logical tests so we're taking this example of test results again so we have our students and we have the score they achieved in test one and the score they achieved in test two and what we're going to say is that they need to have achieved above 75 in test one and above 65 in test two in order to get a result of pass so we're effectively performing two logical tests Here so if

we want to do more than one and we need both of these to be true to get a positive result we use the and formula notice the arguments logical one logical two so our first logical test is if this score is greater than or equal to the pass Mark for test one F4 to lock and the second test score he is also greater than or equal to the pass Mark For test two F4 to lock both of those have to be true in order to pass now I'm going to hit enter it's going to give

me a result of true or false if I want to add meaning to this and have parcel fail I would need to edit this formula and wrap it in an if statement remember that is how we add meaning the first argument for our if statement is The Logical test well those are being generated by a and formula so I can go straight to the end and just Define what I want it to say so if both of those are true it's going to be a pass if both or one of those are false it's going

to be a fail close the bracket hit enter and now I've combined two functions together to perform two logical tests and I've given the meaning using F or Works in a very similar way except what we're saying here is that they need to have achieved The pass Mark in test one or in test two in order to achieve a result of pass so we're going to go straight in and type in our if formula our logical test well we want to generate this using our or calculation logical one logical two so if score one is

greater than or equal to the pass mark F4 to lock or score 2 is greater than or equal to the Pass Mark for test two F4 to lock close off our or we're now back into our if statement we can now set up the value if those are true so if that's true we have a pass if it's false we have a fail Ctrl enter and then I can copy that down so notice here that the only one that comes up as fail is where both of these scores are less than the pass marks so

we've looked at basic logical functions there we've seen and we've seen or and We've seen how we can add meaning by using IF and in the next lesson we're going to look at if statements in a lot more detail in this lesson we're really going to isolate that if function and take a look at it in a little bit more detail now we saw in the previous lesson some basic uses of if and how we can use if to add meaning to true or false results now the ifs that I've showed you so far we've

been typing them directly into the Cell now that might be your preferred method but also remember that you can use the functions dialog box if you find that a little bit easier now you can access your functions dialog box simply by clicking on this FX icon and then searching through your functions list for the function that you want so in this case if if I click go there it is at the top alternatively I could jump across to the formulas Tab and in my functions library From The Logical group I could choose if and that's

basically going to open up my arguments but in a dialog box as opposed to just having them appear underneath the formula in the cell now some people find this method a lot easier particularly when they're learning more complex formulas I'm somebody who prefers to just type it into the cell but I'm going to show you this example using the functions dialog box so you can see the other option that you have Now before we get on to doing this let's just take a look at our data so here I have a list of furniture sales

for 2018 and 2019. we have the products listed in column A the customer the date the item cost the number of items they purchased and the total cost and the total cost is a calculation it's basically the item cost multiplied by the number of items and what we need to do here is complete the shipping column and the total column And I can see over here for orders over fifteen hundred dollars there's going to be a shipping charge of two percent of the cost so we need to make sure we incorporate this calculation into at

if formula so let's widen out this column just a little bit so we have more room and I'm going to click in cell G4 let's jump up to formulas into logical and select if now notice as soon as I've done that It's put the word if into the cell and now I can perform my logical test so my logical test in this scenario is if the total cost in cell F4 is greater than 1500. now if I'd hard-coded 1500 into here the formula is still going to work but this goes back to one of those

golden rules I was speaking about earlier if you do hard code your numbers into your formulas and then those numbers change It means you're going to have to go back in find the formula and edit it and then copy that formula down for however many rows that you've got it's much more beneficial efficient and safer to use a cell reference instead so that is why instead of typing in 1500 I would in general have the amount listed in a Cell so I can simply select the cell so if this value changes I only need to

update it in one place and all of my formulas will update automatically Now I am going to copy this formula down so we need to make sure we lock cell K3 so that it doesn't move F4 and notice here in this functions dialog box it's telling me what the result of this logical test is for this first row which is false so here the total cost is not over 1500. now I can specify what I want it to say if this is true well if the total cost is greater than 1500 we need to apply

a two percent shipping charge and that is two percent of the Total cost so we need to perform a calculation here so if it's true we want to do the total cost multiplied by two percent the result that we have in K4 F4 to lock that cell because we're going to copy it down if it's false so if it's under 1500 well there's going to be no shipping charge so I can simply put a zero in there let's click on OK and double click to Copy that formula down notice for all of the values which

are under 1500 we have no shipping charge but as soon as we get to one that is over 1500 the shipping charge is two percent of that total cost figure so now just to complete this table we can perform a very simple sum calculation we just need to add together the total cost and the shipping cost Ctrl enter and double click to copy that down so now if any of this information changes over here so maybe for orders Over a thousand when I hit enter my table is going to update and I've only had to

change it in one place If the percentage changes so maybe it changes to five percent I can simply change it here and all of my numbers are going to update so everything is very efficient in the previous couple of lessons we started to explore the usage of if to make logical decisions and in this lesson I want to move your Knowledge on a little bit and start talking about nested if statements now you might be thinking to yourself what on Earth are nested if statements well basically what they are are if statements inside other if

statements so let's take a look at an example of what I mean now in this table of data again we just have some employee data so we have employee names location information Department the date they were hired the number of years They've been at the company their salary and then the job rating and it's this column here that is going to be important in this particular lesson because what we're trying to do here is we're trying to dish out end of year bonuses based on that employee's job rating and notice I have another little table

on the right hand side which basically sets out the bonus amount assigned to each job rating so if they have a job Rating of 5 which is the best in this case they're going to get a bonus of three thousand dollars if their job rating is four it's going to be fifteen hundred three nine hundred two one hundred and if it's one or zero they're going to get nothing so what I'm having to do here is basically I need to perform multiple logical tests because I want the formula to look at this cell and say

if it's 5 the bonus is this amount if it's four the bonus is This amount if it's three the bonus is this amount so on and so forth and this is where nested if statements come in and I will say these can get quite complicated but when you break them down they're actually pretty logical so let's take a look at how we would construct this now the result that I'm actually looking for in column age is I basically just wanted to Output the amount of the bonus so three thousand fifteen hundred nine Hundred so on

and so forth I don't want it to say bonus or no bonus at this stage so we're going to type in equals if and open our bracket so we want our first logical test so we're going to say if the job rating in cell G4 is equal to 5 which we have listed in cell j4 remember I could have hard coded this in and typed five but we want to try and get away from hard coding in values and use the cell reference instead I'm going to lock this cell because I don't want it to

move now if that is true they're going to get a bonus of 3000 so I simply want to select the cell and again make sure that I lock it comma now normally at this stage I would then go and type in the value if false but I need to add in more logical statements so I'm going to go straight into my second if and this is where we get the terminology Nested ifs because you have if statements inside other if statements and I basically go through this process again so if the job rating is equal

to four this time so J5 lock the cell if that's true they're going to get a bonus of 1500 lock the cell comma next if statement if the job rating is equal to 3 then they're going to get a bonus of 900 if the job rating Is equal to two then they're going to get a bonus of 100 and then the final if and then we have our final if the job rating now I could put here equal to one but if they've got a zero I also want it to include that so what I'm

going to say is if it's less than or equal to one then They're going to get nothing and then the value of false is going to be zero now that is a really long formula and it's a little bit easier to see in that formula bar now when you're constructing formulas like this remember you need to close off as many brackets or parentheses as you've opened so I've got quite a few there if I count them I think I've got about four or five so let's just add four onto the end here when I hit

enter If I haven't got enough which I haven't in this case Excel is going to automatically correct me so I'm going to say yes to select the correction let's double click to copy this formula down and I should find that everything in here works so the job rating of one is going to give a result of nothing which is correct a job rating of four they're going to get 1500 job rating of five three thousand job rating of 2 100 so on and so forth now notice here that I have this little green triangle in

the corner this is denoting that there is some kind of warning or maybe an error on these cells and what this is basically telling me if I click this little warning icon is that I have unprotected formulas so it's a long formula that I haven't protected so anyone can go in here and make changes to this formula now I'm actually fine with that so what I'm going to do is Ctrl shift down to select all of the Cells and I'm going to say ignore error just to get rid of those green triangles always worth checking

your warnings sometimes they are errors that you need to fix sometimes they're just kind of notifications letting you know that maybe you haven't included enough data or maybe in this case a long formula is unprotected so that is a nested if statement we have if statements inside if statements now it might be that I Want to do this in a slightly different way so maybe instead of having the actual bonus amounts listed out just here maybe I just wanted to say if they're going to get a bonus or if they're not going to get a

bonus because basically everybody with a job rating of two to five is going to get a bonus it's only those with a job rating of one who aren't going to get a bonus so Ctrl shift down I'm going to delete this formula out and we're going to just Reconstruct it in a slightly different way so I'm going to say if our logical test if the job rating now this time I'm going to say is greater than or equal to 2 remember we need to lock that if that is true then they're going to get a

bonus if that is false so if the job rating is less than 2 they're not going to get a bonus so that formula is a lot shorter to Construct so it really all depends how you want to do these and set this up now we'll say that with that nested if statement it is a very long formula and there is a newer formula that's been released in the later versions of excel so from Excel 2016 onwards called if s not to be confused with nested ifs we have a formula called if s and if I

type it into a cell you can see it sitting just there now this is a way to make our nested if Statement formulas a little bit shorter I will say not that much shorter but a little bit quicker to construct and that's what we're going to take a look at in the next lesson in the last lesson I showed you how you can create a rather long nested if statement in order to perform multiple logical tests and what we ended up with was a pretty long formula now I did mention that in recent versions of

excel there's been a New formula added called if s which makes constructing nested if statements a little bit more efficient and I emphasize the word a little bit it really just means you don't have to keep typing in if each time you can go straight into the logical statement so it is a little bit more efficient but don't be expecting it to drastically decrease the amount of time you spend constructing this formula so let me show you a couple of different examples Now we're going to do the same example again just so you can see

how it compares to the nested if statement on familiar data so if I want to do basically the same thing as what we did in the last lesson and output the bonus based on the job rating instead of doing all of those if statements I could use the if s function I'm going to press the Tab Key to select it from the list logical test one so we're doing the same thing here so if The job rating in G4 is equal to 5 F4 to lock that cell if that is true we want it to

return a bonus of three thousand F4 to lock the cell now in the old nested if way of doing this we would then need to go in and start typing in our if statement now with the if s function we don't have to do that we can literally go straight into logical test number two so we don't have to type in if we can simply say if G4 is equal to 4 F4 to lock then they're going to get a bonus of 1500. we don't need the if statement again we can say if G4 is

equal to 3 then they're going to get a bonus of 900 so on and so forth I also don't need a false argument here so I can literally carry on going through I'm going to stop there because I think You've got the idea I simply need to close my bracket if I do a control enter and then copy down notice that for the ones that I've set this for so job rating 5 4 and 3 I have values in there now this time I have n a because I haven't assigned job ratings one and two

to anything so Excel doesn't know what to do here so that is why I have an N A error and towards the end of this section I'm going to show you how you can deal with things like n a errors In your worksheet and make those more meaningful as well but hopefully you get the idea as to how EFS works it's basically the same as doing nested if statements except you don't need to keep typing if into the formula and you don't need to provide a false result on the end let's take a look at

another example of how we can use if s now here we're going to construct a basic FS formula that's going to return the day of the week when A day number is typed in so the way that I see this is that Sunday is day number one Monday is day two Tuesday day three so on and so forth and I want people to be able to come down here and enter in number four and have it return the day from this list above here so we can do this using IF s so we can say

equals if s so if the value in this cell which is currently empty at the moment is equal to one now I am going to hard code this in here but As I said you may want to list one to seven out somewhere in your spreadsheet so you can use that cell reference but for the time being let's just leave it on one so if the number in a11 is equal to one if that's true I want it to return the result of Sunday comma straight into logical tests too if the value in a11 is

equal to 2 it's going to return a result of Monday I'm going to carry on going so if a11 is equal to 3 we're going to get a result Of Tuesday so let's just carry on going through all of these if a11 is equal to 4 then we're going to get Wednesday a11 is equal to 5 we're going to get Thursday if a11 is equal to 6 then we're going to get Friday and then finally if a11 is equal to 7 we're going to get Saturday close off the if s and hit enter now currently

we have an N A error in here because I don't have anything in cell a11 and this formula consistently Refers to that cell looking for a number but now if I add let's say 2 it's going to give me my result let's add 7 and it changes if I add something outside of the criteria that I've specified I'm going to get an N A error now it might be again that you want to add in some error checking so that if somebody types in a number outside of one to seven instead of just getting n

a you want it to say to them please type a Number between one and seven and we're going to explore how we would do something like that towards the end of this section when we look at error checking but those are a couple of different examples of how you can use if s and hopefully that illustrates quite nicely the differences between nested ifs and the if s formula I recently conducted a poll on LinkedIn where I asked all of my followers and connections to let me know which Functions in Excel they find the most useful

and by far the clear winner was countifs and some ifs and both of these functions as well as their sister functions average if Min if and Max if are effectively if statements which have conditions or have criteria and there's a really important distinction to make here in this lesson we're going to talk about count if sum if and average if in the next lesson we're going to talk about Countifs plural sum ifs average ifs and those latter three are newer additions to excel the original functions that we've had for quite a while now are the

singular countif sum if average if so let's start out in this lesson by taking a look at how those work and then we'll add a bit of complexity to it in the next lesson what we have here is a small table we have some sales team members we have the company that they work for we've just Got two companies in here we have their job titles so they're either a sales rep or a sales manager and then we have the total amount in dollars that they've sold now what I want to find out is some

information but based on criteria so if we take a look at this first table and just concentrate on this first one my criteria is going to be Micro World because what I want to work out here are the total sales for microworld so we're adding in a condition where we have to Tell the formula perform a sum calculation of the total sales but only when the company is equal to microweld so we only want to add up those total sales so in this scenario where we have one piece of criteria which is microworld we use

the singular form sum if and this is a fairly straightforward calculation to do so let's type in equals sum if what arguments do we have here well our First argument is range our second argument is criteria and then we have a third optional argument how do I know this is an optional argument well it's enclosed in square brackets so every time you see an argument that has square brackets around the outside it means it's not a mandatory piece of criteria you don't have to include it in order to get this formula to work now we

are going to include some range in this calculation so we're going to use all of The arguments now my first argument here is range and then we have criteria now I like to work backwards when I'm thinking about this what is my criteria in this formula or my criteria is microworld so my range is going to be wherever I'm going to find the word microworld so I'm going to find that in the company range so my first argument here is the range and then I can specify the criteria that I'm looking for so the criteria

I have listed in cell F6 Now again I could have hard coded in the word microworld in quote marks of course but as I said wherever possible try and use cell references now the final argument here is that optional argument of sum range now in this case I do need this because otherwise Excel isn't going to know what I want to add up I haven't told it to add up the total sales yet so my sum range is going to be total sales close the bracket hit enter and there is My result so let's review

we're saying sum if the company range equals Micro World if it does sum the total sales so that is sum if where we use a single piece of criteria in this case microworld let's take a look at how this would work if we're counting as opposed to summing so in this second example again we have one piece of criteria I want to work out the total number of employees at computech so effectively I want it to look through this table and Wherever it finds computech I want it to count the number of entries and that's

effectively going to give me the number of employees that work there so for this we have one piece of criteria so we're using count if singular this time we have two arguments range and criteria again I like to work backwards my criteria is going to be computech which range am I going to find that in I'm Going to find it in the company range comma my criteria is computech effectively cell F14 close the bracket hit enter it's telling me there are six employees at computech and because my data set is reasonably small I can just

do a quick visual check just there and yes I do have six employees it's also worth noting that down in the status bar if you take a look over on the right hand side it's telling me the Count is six if you can't see that information a little quick tip here if you right click in the status bar make sure you have average count numerical count min max and sum turned on so that when you start selecting things in your worksheet you can see all of those values in the status bar at the bottom so

let's do the final calculation down here this is just doing an average so this time I want to find the average sales for computech Again one piece of criteria so this time we're going to use average if in its singular form we have three arguments just here my criteria is computex so the range is going to be company the criteria is computech and the average range well I'm looking for the average of the sales so I want to use the sales range close the bracket hit enter and now I get my average so that is

how we can use those three super Useful formulas to return results based on one piece of criteria in the next lesson I'm going to show you how you can do the same thing but how we can incorporate multiple pieces of criteria in the previous lesson I showed you how to construct three conditional if formulas sum if countif and average if and all three of those formulas use one piece of criteria so now what we're going to do is we're going to move our Knowledge on a little bit and I'm going to show you how you

can use countifs some ifs and average ifs to create formulas that use multiple pieces of criteria and I will say that these formulas the plural versions with the S on the end these are newer formulas in Excel these were introduced a few years ago and they've quickly become the favorite formulas of a lot of people simply because they are so useful now let's take this first example the only Real difference between some ifs and some if is the number of pieces of criteria we're using in the formula when we use a sum if we can

only specify one piece of criteria whereas if we use sum ifs we can specify multiple pieces of criteria so let's take a look at this second example what I'm trying to do here is work out the total sales for all sales reps who work at microworld So I have two pieces of criteria here microworld and sales rep so because I have two pieces of criteria I need to use some ifs as opposed to sum if now another difference between this formula and the sum F Formula is the way that the arguments are organized in the

sum if formula the sum range argument is at the end and you specify your criteria and range first whereas when you're using some ifs You're asked to specify the sum range first of all and I actually find this a lot more logical to understand so the first thing we need to do here is specify the sum range so what are we trying to add up well we're trying to add up the total sales [Music] criteria range one what is our first piece of criteria when our first piece of criteria is going to be microweld so

our first Criteria range is going to be wherever we find the word microworld which is the company range [Music] criteria one is microweld comma notice the arguments have now moved on to criteria range 2. so I can now add in my second piece of criteria so once again I like to work backwards what is my second piece of criteria well that is sales rep where am I going to find that I'm going to find it in the Job title range so we're going to select the criteria range and then select the criteria which is sales

rep I can then close my bracket because I only have two pieces of criteria and when I hit enter it's going to give me my result and again because I have a fairly small data set here I could do a quick visual check let's look through for microworld sales reps so we have one just here we have another one just here And that is it so basically my result should be the total of these two cells and I can see that yes that looks to be correct what about if I have three pieces of criteria

well again we can use some IFS as some range is the total sales what is our first piece of criteria well it's Micro World we're going to find that in the range company our criteria is microweld our second criteria range is going to be The job title because the second piece of criteria is sales rep and now we have a third criteria range so we only want to see sales that are greater than seven thousand dollars so criteria range 3 is going to be the total sales range and our criteria is what we have listed

in here greater than seven thousand again I could have hard coded that in by typing in greater than 7000 but if that changes it makes it a lot more difficult so I'm Going to stick with the cell reference close the bracket hit enter and there I get my total and I could carry on going if I had six pieces of criteria I could use some ifs for that as well and this works pretty much the same when you're using countifs for this example we have two pieces of criteria I'm looking to find the total number

of employees at computech with the job title sales manager so for this we can use Countifs this time criteria range one well our first piece of criteria is computech we're going to find that in this range just here and our criteria is computech our second criteria range is going to be the job title range because our second piece of criteria is sales manager close the bracket hit enter and there we go let's do the final one because practice does make perfect criteria range one Is the company our criteria is computech criteria range 2 is the

job title and our criteria is sales manager criteria 3 is less than nine thousand so we're going to select total sales and less than 9000 is our criteria range close the bracket hit enter and I get my result hopefully you're getting the idea but let's just finish this off by doing the average so we're going to say average Ifs our average range is going to be our total sales that's what we want to find the average of criteria range one is going to be the company and the criteria is computech criteria range 2 is the

job title and the criteria is sales rep close the bracket hit enter and there I get my average now it's worth noting that we have these formulas for Min and Max as well so if I just show you a Quick example we do have a Min ifs that we could use if I wanted to find the minimum value in a Range so if I wanted to find the minimum sale I could choose the total sales as my minimum range my criteria might be the minimum sales for computech so my criteria range would be the company

criteria one let's just grab computech from over here I could carry on going if I had more pieces of criteria but effectively I would do exactly the same Thing it's going to give me the minimum amount of sales for computech I just want to finish off this section on logical functions and if statements by talking a little bit about how you can use ifs to handle errors in your spreadsheets now if we take a look at this example just here we're fairly familiar with this data this is that bonus spreadsheet we were looking at previously

now in this bonus column if we take a look at the first Formula I've Basically set up a formula to work out the bonus only for people who have a job rating of five or four and so you can see that reflected in this column so where they have a job rating of four or five we have the bonus amount anything under four so one two or three we have an N A error in the cell and that's because I haven't accounted for job ratings one two and three in this particular formula now it might

be that you are happy to leave your Spreadsheet looking like this but what I will say is that if you do have a spreadsheet that has lots of Errors contained within cells even if those errors are correctly there which they are in this case it makes your spreadsheet not only look a little bit messy if you were to send this to somebody else who's maybe not familiar with the data they might think that these are actual errors that need to be fixed what would be much better here Would be to add some meaning to these

n a errors so maybe instead of n a I wanted to say no bonus which makes it a lot clearer now we can do this by using error handling formulas and if we jump up to the formulas tab in this logical group you're going to find the two that we're going to use in this lesson in here we're going to take a look at if error and if n a now let's start out with if n a now what if fan a will do is it will help you Deal with any n a errors that

you have in your spreadsheet now n a isn't the only type of error that you might see in cells you might see a div error or a value error or a name error and all of these different errors mean different things but if you specifically have an N A error in a Cell you can use the if n a function to assign meaning to that now as we do have an N A error we're going to use that function now what I want to do here is let's select the first cell That contains a formula

let's jump up and edit this in the formula bar now what we're going to do is we're going to type in if n a that's the formula we're going to use now notice underneath this particular function has two arguments value and value if n a so in other words value if we find an N A in the cell now the first argument the value well the value in this cell is generated by that if s formula so effectively the fs formula is our first argument it is our Value so we can click on the end

press comma and now all we need to do is simply specify what we want to say in the cell if it comes across an N A error well I wanted to say no bonus we need to add this in quote marks and close the bracket so we've wrapped an if n a formula around our FS formula hit enter and take a look at that now if I copy this down I've replaced all of those n a errors with something that is a lot more meaningful a text string that Says no bonus now the FNA formula

can only be used when you have n a errors in your spreadsheet and as I said there are lots of different types of errors that you can get in a cell and for any other error you can't use if n a to assign any meaning that is where we would use the second error handling formula if error if error Works in a very similar way to if n a but it will handle all types of Errors not just n a errors So let's take a look at this in action as well if we jump across

to the if error spreadsheet if you recall we put together a little formula here and again it's an FS formula which gave us the day of the week when we enter in a day number and what I said was that if somebody enters a day that isn't one to seven so for example eight is going to produce an error because the formula doesn't Account for that now in this case I am getting an N A error again so I could effectively use the if n a error handling but we're going to do this in a

different way and we're going to use if error instead so if error we can use for any type of error and we edit the formula in exactly the same way so we're going to type in if error at the beginning we have the same two arguments value and value if error The value again is going to be generated by our FS formula so we can go right to the end press comma and then we can enter in what we want it to say now in this case I wanted to say please enter a number between

one and seven so what I'm doing here is basically giving the user a little bit of guidance if they enter an incorrect value so let's hit enter and there we have that piece of text and if I choose a Different day it doesn't come up but if I put in day number 10 I'm going to get that piece of text so using error handling in this way can really help you keep your spreadsheets consistent meaningful and easy to understand for anybody who might be using them the only takeaways here are if you have n a

errors in the cell you can use FNA or if error if you have any other type of error you can only use if error it's time now to do exercise one and in This exercise we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in this section on logical functions so in the first part of this exercise I'd like you to use either nested ifs or the ifs function and complete the prize money field in the table and you'll notice on the right we have a smaller table which contains the information that we're looking

for and remember if you're going to copy this formula down then you need to make sure that you're Locking those cell references in place in the second part of this exercise we have a similar table but this time I'd like you to practice using countif sumif count ifs and sum ifs and I want you to use those formulas and complete the results in column H so it's time to pause this video and give that a go if you'd like to see the answer then please keep watching so in this exercise we need to use nested

ifs or the ifs function to work out the prize money So I'm going to use if s to do this so we want our first logical test well our logical test is if the medal is equal to bronze F4 to lock that cell reference if that's true then they're going to get a hundred dollars in prize money F4 to lock comma because I'm using FS I can go straight into logical test number two if the value in cell D4 is equal to Silver Then they're going to get 250 in prize money and the last logical

test is if the value in D4 is equal to gold then they're going to get 500 in prize money close off the bracket hit enter and now we can copy this down and if we do a quick spot check let's take a look every time we have gold we have 500 bronze we have 100 and silver we have 250. let's take a look at the second part of the exercise well here we need To use countifs and some ifs so in the first table here we need to find the number of athletes from the USA

now we only have one piece of criteria so for this I'm going to use countif my criteria is going to be USA where am I going to find that I'm going to find it in the country column control shift down arrow I'm going to work on this up in the formula bar and my criteria because I don't have it contained within a cell I'm going to Need to type that in so let's put USA in quote marks close the bracket and hit enter the next one we have two pieces of criteria so we need to

use countifs so our first piece of criteria is going to be that the athlete is from Australia so our criteria range number one is going to be the country column control shift down arrow let's work on this up in the formula bar our first piece of criteria is Australia Criteria range 2 while our second piece of criteria is female so our criteria range is going to be the gender column comma and our criteria is going to be f close the bracket hit enter and there I get my result and finally we have three pieces of

criteria here so countifs again we're looking for athletes from the UK who are male who achieved a silver medal so three pieces of criteria our first criteria range is the country Ctrl shift down arrow up in the formula bar once again and criteria number one is UK criteria range two is the gender so let's select that Ctrl shift down arrow and our criteria this time is mail and our third criteria range is the color of their medal so let's select that time we are looking for silver metals close the bracket hit enter and there we

get the result and finally I asked you To work out the total prize money for various different pieces of criteria so for this we're going to use the sum IF function for the first one we just need some if because we only have one piece of criteria our criteria is the USA so our range is going to be the country Ctrl shift down arrow and then we need to put our criteria in quote marks and then our sum range is going to be The prize money control shift down arrow close that bracket and hit enter

now we need to do some ifs because we have multiple pieces of criteria this time we have the sum range first of all so we're going to sum the prize money once again criteria range 1 is going to be the gender and the gender we're looking for this time is female and then our final piece of criteria is that we're looking for Canadian Athletes only so we want our criteria range to be the country and our criteria is going to be Canada now the final one was a little bit unfair of me really because I

didn't actually show you this in the lesson but I wanted to show you this in the exercise just so you can see something else that you can do with some F's now for this one we want to Total the prize money for North America so that's going to be the USA and Canada so we Have two pieces of criteria that are coming from the same column so how would we do this well if you worked this out well done it's not too hard to work out but what we need to do here is basically perform

two sumif calculations so let's start out with our sum f we want our range so our criteria is going to be USA first of all so our range is going to be the country range and our criteria is going to be USA And we want to specify as some range which is going to be the prize money now what we need to do here is close off the bracket and then say that we want to plus and then go straight into the next sum if so again our range is going to be the country but

this time the criteria is Canada and then finally the sum range is the prize money and close the bracket so we're just doing two sum ifs and We're adding them together so that we can get the total for two pieces of criteria that are coming from the same column let's say enter and there is our answer so hopefully you got most of those I wouldn't expect you to get the last one but if you did very well done I will see you in the next section in this lesson we're going to learn how to look

up information using some of the best loved functions in Excel and those Would be lookup functions and probably the most well-known lookup function is vlookup and vlookup is one of those functions that you'll always see at the top of the list when it comes to most useful functions or functions that everybody should know and that's because you can use vlookup in so many different scenarios now when it comes to using vlookup there are two different ways that you can use it you can do an exact match or you can do an Approximate match and in

this lesson we're going to start out by taking a look at the more common of those two which is vlookup exact match now before we get on to how you construct a Veen lookup let's first make sure that we all understand what exactly a vlookup is and how it can be useful so I've just got a little example of a vlookup on this page so I have a small data table which Contains some order numbers the items that these order numbers relate to and then the price of those items and what I've done over here

is I've constructed a little data validation drop down list for all of the different order numbers and what I can do here is Select an order number from this list and it's going to return the item and the price and if I click on any of these cells just here notice in the formula bar I'm Actually using a vlookup now what this formula is actually doing is it's basically saying look up whatever value we have in cell G3 look it up in this table over here and then return the information from column number two and

then the vlookup underneath is basically doing exactly the same thing but it's saying instead return the information in column number three so that is how vlookup works now a couple of really important points when You're working with vlookup what you're using as your lookup value so for us in this example that is the value in cell G3 it has to exist in the table of data because without the lookup value Excel doesn't know which of these results it needs to return so that is basically how a vlookup works so now let's look at how we

construct it using a different example now if we jump across to the next worksheet you can see that I have On here just a few different part numbers and currently the description and the unit price columns are blank and then on the third worksheet I have a parts catalog and this contains the part numbers in column A the descriptions in column B and the price in column C so basically what I want to do here is I want to use the part number as the lookup value because this is the column that is common between

these two tables I want to look up the part number in the parts catalog and then I want to return either the description or the price depending on which one I'm doing so let's construct our vlookup now the first thing that we want to return here is the description for part number 19232 so I'm going to type in equals vlookup let's take a look at our arguments the first argument here is the lookup value so that's the piece of information that is common between the Two tables so for us the part number is our lookup

value we then need to specify where we're looking up this part number so what is the table array now it might be that you have your table on the same spreadsheet and that is fine you can just select it if I jump across two parts catalog I can select this entire table and that is my table array now I'm going to go to the formula bar to continue my Editing and notice what I have in that formula bar now because my table is on a different worksheet it's put in the worksheet name parts catalog and

then the cell range I now need to specify the column index number and that is basically the column of information that we want to return now we're looking up the description first of all and this is a really important point about vlookup when it comes to the column index number vlookup Numbers columns in the table from left to right so part number would be column one description column two and price column three so if we want to return the description we're returning column number two and our final argument which is an optional argument because it's

in Brackets is a true or false argument and what we select here determines if we're doing an approximate match or an exact Match now we're going to do an exact match because we exactly want to match the part number in the table so we can have a false argument on the end here or alternatively we could just put zero that would also do an exact match or because this is an optional argument I don't even need to have that on the end because the default behavior for vlookup is to do an exact match so I'm

going to leave it off let's hit enter and it brings back that Description information now I'm going to widen out this column a little bit and I think I'm going to wrap this text around just so it doesn't take up so much room let's do the same thing but let's do it for unit price instead so we're basically going to construct the vlookup in exactly the same way it's just the column that we're returning that is different so this time we want to return column number three So equals vlookup our lookup value is still the

part number our table array is our parts catalog and I'm going to show you a simpler way of doing this in a moment let's select the entire table and go up to continue editing in the formula bar the column index number where we want to return the information from column three and we're exactly matching that part number so we can have false zero or nothing on the end there Hit enter and there we get that unit price now you might want to do a little bit of messing around with the formatting of this cell but

that is basically how vlookup works now if I was to try and copy these formulas down they're actually not going to work correctly because I haven't locked the cell range so I know it looks like they're working fine it's actually returning the wrong results down here from the table because I didn't lock the cell references so as I drag down this entire table is moving down as well so a way that I like to do this I find this a lot easier is if I'm doing a vlookup in general I will make my table of

data a named range so let me just very quickly do these again and show you how that works so I'm going to go to my parts catalog Ctrl a to select everything and in the name box I'm going to call this Parts underscore Catalog Now by naming this range it makes your vlookup a lot easier to construct so let's go to vlookup our lookup value is the part number add table array well this time I don't need to jump across to the other worksheet and select that range I can simply press the F3 key on

my keyboard and it's going to bring up all the named ranges that I have in this workbook there is mine parts catalog let's select It and the cool thing about this is that when you create a named range it's basically very similar to locking the cell so they're never going to move column index number is 2 and we're doing an exact match close the bracket Ctrl enter and then I can double click to copy down and my results are correct let's just do this again for the unit price lookup value is part number F3 to

pull up my named ranges let's Select the parts catalog the column we're pulling back this time is column number three and we want to do a false argument on the end or a zero or absolutely nothing it's all good double click to copy down now one thing to note here is take a look at this part number I have n a errors in these cells now I'm going to Hazard a guess that I've got these errors because this part number doesn't exist in the catalog so if I want to do A quick check I can

jump across to my parts catalog I'm going to do a control F for find and I'm going to try and find that part number one two three four five next it can't find it so that is why I'm getting that n a error now as we saw in the previous lesson when we were talking about error checking I might want to tidy these errors up a little bit by adding in some error handling so let's click on that first Formula up in the formula bar this is an N A error so I'm Going to use

the if n a function the value is going to be generated by the vlookup and I'm going to make this a bit more meaningful by just adding on to the end here Parts not found so anyone looking at this spreadsheet is going to know that that is the reason why we don't have a description and unit price let's do the same for this one up to the Formula bar if n a click at the end and this time I'm going to say price not [Music] found close the bracket Ctrl enter and then I can double

click to copy down and now this table doesn't look like it includes errors we've added some meaning so that is how you do a vlookup using that exact match option that false argument on the end In the next lesson I'm going to show you another example but this time we're going to be doing an approximate match using the true argument on the end in the previous lesson we saw how we can use vlookup with the exact match false argument on the end to return results so in this lesson we're going to look at the true

argument the approximate matching option so what is the difference between these two well you would use approximate Matching for your vlookup if your lookup value doesn't exist exactly in the table so what do I mean by that well if we take a look at the data that we have on this worksheet in this first table I have effectively some salary bands and this is showing me the low end and the high end of this band and then the tax rate that applies to each of those bands and what I want to do in the second

table is I want to look up the salary and I want it to return the marginal tax Rate for that salary now if we take a look at the first one here 55 000 does 55 000 exist exactly in this table over here well if I take a look at my values I can see no I don't have exactly the value 55 000 listed here this annual salary Falls in this bracket just here so if I was to do an exact match it's not going to find it because the exact match argument that false argument

exactly matches the lookup value in the table so for this I'm going To need to use the approximate matching option which is the true argument on the end now I'm going to do exactly what I did in the last lesson and I'm going to create a named range for my table simply to make this whole process a lot easier so let's select the table in the name box we're going to say tax underscore rate and hit enter so now I can construct my vlookup I'm going to type in equals vlookup my lookup value is going

to be the Annual salary the table array well I can press the F 3 key and there is tax rate click on OK the column index number so what do I want to return here well I'm looking for the tax rate which is column number three and this time we want to do an approximate match so we want the true argument on the end alternatively we could just type a one let's close the bracket and hit enter And if I just double check this table I can see that yes 55 000 Falls in this range

just here and the tax rate is 25 let's do that one more time just to practice vlookup lookup value is cell E6 table array we can press F3 alternatively you can just start to type in your named range and it will appear in the list underneath double click to select Comma we want the third column and we're doing an approximate match one on the end this time close the bracket hit enter and let's double check to make sure this is correct this salary Falls in this bracket up here and the marginal tax rate is 10

and just to show you how you can do this using the functions dialog box if that is your preferred method let's click on the FX button I'm going to search for vlookup let's click go there it is double click to Select and now we can complete our arguments in this way so the lookup value for the final one is cell E7 table array I can press the F3 key and select tax rate column index number is 3 and the range lookup is true or a one on the end there let's click on OK to complete

that final one and if I double check this well ninety thousand is going to fall in this range here and that has a tax rate of 28 Percent so that is really the only difference between vlookup exact and vlookup approximate it all relates to the lookup value and whether that lookup value exists exactly in the table or if it doesn't both of the vlookup formulas that we've looked at so far in this section have been using data that runs vertically down the page hence why it's called vlookup so in this lesson I want to show

You an example of age lookup where our data is running horizontally across the page instead now what do I mean by that well on this worksheet I have an example of data that runs vertically down the page we have our column headings at the top and then our rows of data underneath and this is by far the most common way to display data a less common way is to have your column headings in the rows as opposed to in the columns so that your data runs horizontally across the page And whilst this is definitely not

as common you need to be able to have the tools to be able to deal with that scenario and still perform your lookups so what we're going to do first of all is we're going to grab this data and we're going to flip it the other way around and this is also a good opportunity for me to show you a little command you can use if you need to switch data around for any specific reason so I'm going to click in my data Table Ctrl a to select everything Ctrl C to copy and then I'm

going to go across to my hlookup worksheet and I'm going to paste this data onto the worksheet but we're going to paste it running horizontally as opposed to vertically so what we can do here is on the Home tab up to paste click the lower half and go to paste special and if we choose the transpose command that will basically flip your data Around the other way when I click on OK you can see what that's done I now have my column headings in the rows and my data runs horizontally across the page and if

I zoom out a little bit because I do want to do a little bit of resizing so we don't have those hash symbols in some of the cells let's double click to resize all of those and then Zoom back out again perfect now as I said this is by far not my favorite way of displaying data it Really does look quite messy but you will come across data sets throughout your Excel career which will be structured in this way so if we have our data this way around how can we do a lookup well the

simple answer is pretty much in exactly the same way just using the hlookup function as opposed to vlookup so what I want to do up here is I want to be able to type in a movie name so let's just start with La La Land and I want it to return the year what It's rated and the genre so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to create a named range for my data set down here Ctrl a to select all up to that name box and we're going to say movie list

and hit enter so now if I want to return the year I'm going to use hlookup we have exactly the same arguments there is one minor difference in here which I'll speak about more when we get to it first argument is the lookup value Well we want to look up the film so B5 table array where are we looking it up well we've created a named range I can press F3 and select my movie list this time it's asking for a row index number as opposed to a column index number so instead of counting across

columns from left to right we simply need to count down rows until we get to the one that we want to return so we want to return the year in this Example and that is row number two and then we get to use our approximate or exact match well I want to exactly match the movie name in the table so we're going to have a false argument on the end here close the bracket and hit enter and it's telling me that La La Land was released in 2016 and I can see that yes it was

let's do it again so equals hlookup lookup value is the movie f 3 to select our table array Row number this time is row number three because we want to return what it's rated and we're doing an exact match so I'm going to put a zero on the end here close the bracket hit enter and there we go let's complete this set this time I'm going to use the functions dialog box and we're going to search for hlookup there it is double click to open lookup value movie name table array let's press F3 select our

Movie list row index number well this time we're looking for the genre so that is row number one two three four five row number six [Music] and our range lookup we're doing the exact match so it's a false let's click on OK and there we go and if I was to change this film name so let's type in Jackie I should find that all of these results update let's check our table there is Jackie everything is Looking good so that's really the only difference between vlookup and hlookup it's all about how your data is structured

and whether you have those column headings in the rows or the columns whilst vlookup is an amazing function to node to perform powerful lookups after you've been using it for a while you're going to start to come across some of its limitations so in this lesson I want to just briefly talk about the Limitations of vlookup and then show you a better more flexible way of Performing lookups so let's just review now when it comes to vlookup if we take a look at this first example that we were using we're looking up the part number

in the parts catalog and we're returning either the description or the price and the way that we construct the vlookup is we say look up the part number and then return me either column 2 or column three now the big limitation With vlookup is that your lookup value must always be to the left of what it is that you're looking up because we can't count back columns for example I couldn't use the price to look up the part number using vlookup because when it comes to the part of the formula where we have to enter

in a column number I can't say count back minus two columns to get the part number it always has to be a positive going from left to right so the biggest limitation here When using vlookup is that your lookup value either has to be in the First Column or to the left of whatever it is that you want to return now that might be absolutely fine in 90 of scenarios that you're going to come across but you're definitely going to come across some situations where you're going to need a more powerful and flexible way to

perform lookups and that is where index and match come in so let's take a look at these two functions Now index and match are two separate functions in their own right but you often hear them used together in the same sentence because they are used together so often to perform complex and Powerful lookups and the beauty with using index and match to perform your lookup as opposed to something like vlookup is that it doesn't matter where your lookup value is in the table and what column you want to return it's always going to work so

let's take a Look at this example first of all I have a table over here which shows me some categories some apps the revenue those apps have generated and the profit and what I want to do is be able to select an app from this drop down list and have it return the category the profit and the revenue for that app now I'm going to be using the app as the lookup value in this table now the app is in column number two so when it comes to returning the Category I'm effectively having to look

up a column going from right to left so this is a perfect example of where vlookup wouldn't work because we can't have the lookup value in column 2 and return a result from column one so we need a better way of doing this now before we actually combine index and match together to perform this lookup I want to show you what each one does in its own right which will help you understand why they work so well when Used together so I'm going to click in cell H6 and let's take a look at what index

does first of all now index has a couple of different sets of arguments that you can use here and I would say that the first group of arguments is the one that you're going to use most of the time now the first argument here is array now the way that I like to remember this is what is it that I'm looking to return here I'm looking to return the category So my array is going to be the category and an array is effectively another word for range so our first argument is going to be the

category range the category array comma I now need to provide the row number of the item I want to return now I want to return the category for the application OneDrive so if I take a look at my table and find OneDrive it's just here what is the row number well if we start at the top one Two three four five six it's row number seven so if I type row 7 in here close my bracket and hit enter it's going to pull back the category of productivity and if I take a look at that

I can see that yes that is correct now I know exactly what you're thinking at this stage you're probably thinking well that's a bit tedious having to manually count down to find the row number and you would be correct We have a very small data set here so it's not too much of a bother for me to count down but what if I had a data set that had hundreds or thousands of rows I'm really not going to want to spend time counting down the rows to find the value that I need so we need

to find a way of automating the finding of this row number so with that in mind let's take a look at what the match function does on its own we're going to type in equals match Now for this one we have three arguments the last argument is an optional argument the first argument is lookup value well our lookup value is OneDrive what is the lookup array so where will we find the value One Drive which range what we're going to find it in the app range so that is our lookup array do we want to

do an exact match here yes we do I want to exactly match the word OneDrive in the table so I want a zero Argument on the end let's close the bracket and hit enter and take a look at that it Returns the row number that OneDrive sits in so the match function will do what we need it to do it's going to automate the finding of the row number so now we know what each of those functions do we can combine them together to perform this lookup so let's start from the top we're going to

type in index what is our array well our array is what We're looking to return the category comma now we need to provide the row number so this is where we're going to use our match function so we're going to go straight into match our lookup value is OneDrive cell H5 where are we going to find that well it exists in the app range so this is our lookup array and we want to do an exact match of the Word OneDrive in the table we need to close off our match close off our index hit

enter and now we get our category and I should find that if I change this to something else that's the same category let's choose something else it's going to work correctly let's do it again equals index what is our array well this time we're looking to return the profit so this is our array just here Row number well we want to use match to automate that for us the lookup value is H5 we're going to find that value in the apps list that is our lookup array and we want to exactly match the word Instagram

so we want a zero on the end there close off our match close off our index and hit enter let's double check so let's find Instagram in this list yes it is in the category social media and the profit is 786-80 now we're going to do this again For the revenue I'm going to do this in a slightly different way so you can see a couple of other techniques now what I'm going to do here is I'm going to take a look at my data and I'm going to create named ranges for each of these

columns and then I can use those named ranges in my formula now a quick way to do this is to select everything in the table up to the formulas Tab and then in the defined names group I'm going to say create from Selection and I want to use the top row as the names for my ranges let's click on OK so now what I should find if I click the name box drop down is that I have four different named ranges here and they've all been named according to the column heading if I select category

from here that is the range that it refers to if I select Revenue that is the range you don't have to do this I'm just showing you a different way that you Could construct this formula I could then say index this time I'm looking up the revenue so instead of selecting this range of cells I could use the named range so we can type it in or we can press the F3 key and select it from here we then straight into our match to find that row number lookup value is whatever we have in cell

H5 our lookup array where are we going to Find this well we're going to find it in the apps list now because I also have this as a named range I can press F3 again and choose app and I want to exactly match the name Instagram in the table so we've got a zero on the end so let's just take a moment to review what we have there because we've used two named ranges in this formula and the reason why I like to use named ranges is because it does make it a lot easier particularly

if you have a much larger Data set than I have here because it means you're not having to keep selecting cell ranges you can just use the name but it also makes formulas a lot easier for anybody who's looking at this spreadsheet to understand now I need to add another bracket on the end here hit enter and there I get my result let's check to make sure this is working let's choose something else Twitter let's double check in the table That is in the social media category revenue is 17 760 and profit is 800. now

that I've shown you how you can combine the index and match functions to perform a powerful complex lookup we're going to see how we can do exactly the same thing in a different way and when I say in a different way I mean using two brand new functions in Excel 2021 and that is xlookup and x match now as I said these two functions are brand new to excel 2021 and X lookup is really Another way of performing a lookup very similar to index and match so it has all of the same flexibility that we

love about index and match but it's a lot easier to construct so let's use the same examples but this time instead of index and match we're going to use x lookup so let's click in our cell I'm going to type in equals x lookup now the first difference you'll notice here is that we do have a lot more arguments and it's only the first first three that are Mandatory all of the others the last three are all optional arguments now we're going to go through all of them just so you can see exactly what they

do but if you just wanted to do a basic lookup you could just use the first three arguments so the first argument is lookup value so our lookup value is going to be whatever we have in cell H5 comma what is our lookup array so where are we going to find Google Docs What we're going to find in the apps list so this is our lookup array and then we simply need to specify the return array so what do we want to return we want to return the category so all we need to do is

select the return array that is basically it I could close off my formula hit enter and I'm going to get my answer now how much easier is that than doing the same thing using index a match now let's double click to go back into this formula Because I did say I wanted to run through all of these arguments so the next argument is if not found so we have some additional things we can specify here so if the lookup value is not found in the table we can choose to return a value that we specify

so that might be a piece of text remember text needs to go in quote marks so I might just want to say here not found comma I can choose what type of match I'm doing do I want to do an exact match Do I want to do an exact match or next smaller item or next larger item well I'm going to do an exact match I want it to exactly match Google Docs and then the final optional argument that we have here is the search mode so with this particular argument we can choose which way

or how we're searching through this table so I could choose to search from first to last or last to first now if I do first to last let's type one as our final argument it's Going to return the result of productivity now we're going to do X lookup again to return the profit and the revenue but we're going to do this in a slightly different way again now so far we've seen how we can create named ranges and use those in our formulas but what about if I want to put this data in an Excel

table well what I'm going to do is click in my data and press Ctrl t yes my table has headers let's click on ok now I don't particularly like this Formatting so let's change that that looks a little bit better and I'm going to give my table a name so let's call this apps underscore list and hit enter so now what I could do when I'm constructing this x lookup let's do it again so X lookup and lookup value is what we have in cell H5 my lookup array is a table this time now I've

called my table apps list so I'm just going to start to type in double click to select that table now It's selected the entire table but my lookup array is just the app column so what I can do here is press the square bracket and it's going to show me all of the different Columns of that table so I can then go through and just select the app column press the Tab Key to select it and close that bracket so now I've isolated that column comma what is my return array well my return array this

time I want to return the profit So again I could use my table columns let's choose the table square bracket and I want to choose the profit column this time Tab Key to select and close that square bracket now if I want to essentially skip over an argument so I don't particularly want to have any if not found text I can just press two commas to move on to the next argument I want to do an exact match and I want to search first to last Close the bracket hit enter and it's going to return

my result let's double check to make sure that this is correct so let's find Google Docs and I can see that yes the profit is one one six six now for our final X lookup just here I want to focus in on that search mode so which way we're searching through our data so let's do our X lookup one more time our lookup value is H5 and look up array well I'm going to use my table Range again I'm looking up the app in the app column [Music] the return array this time is going to

be the revenue so let's select a table and the column I'm not going to put in any if not found text let's press another comma to go on to the next argument I want to do an exact match and I'm going to search first to last close the bracket hit enter and I get my Result now with that search mode searching first to last that works perfectly fine for the data that I'm using but what if I have Google Docs listed twice in this table so what I'm going to do is on the bottom here

I'm just going to add another row for Google Docs and we're going to assign it to a different category so let's say utility it's going to be Google Docs again and let's just give it a value of a 50 000 with a profit of let's say five thousand Now I'm just going to expand my table out to accommodate that new data so now effectively I have Google Docs listed twice in this apps list now currently if we use the revenue as an example it showed me the revenue of the first Google Docs that it finds

in this list because I chose to search from first to last but if we double click to edit this formula what I could do is I could change this to something different so Let's do search last first minus one and hit enter and we get a completely different result this time it's searching from the bottom upwards and the first Google Docs entry it comes to is this one just here so it's returning a result of fifty thousand for the revenue so that's how that search mode option works but as I said in its most basic

form if you don't want to use all of those optional arguments you just have Three arguments lookup value lookup array and return array super simple so now we know what x lookup does what does x match do well x match is fairly similar in many ways we have a lot more arguments than we do when we're using just the basic match so what I could do up here is if I want to go back to using index and match I could do an index with an x match instead our array is the category so let's

select it and notice that because I have this data in a table it's automatically going to put the table name and the column name in for me row number and if you recall previously we were using the match function to automate the finding of that row number but what I could do is use the new x match function instead again the last two arguments here are optional arguments now my lookup value is what we have in H5 my lookup array is where I'm going to find that so that's in this Apps list I can then

choose a match mode so I want to do an exact match and then I also get that search mode option when using x match as well so I can choose if I want to search from first to last last to first I'll start doing a binary search and sorting in ascending order so let's do last first again minus one close the bracket hit enter I can see that I've forgotten to add an additional bracket on the end so I'm going to Accept the correction and it pulls back the category of utility because it's finding this

entry first because it's searching last to first now you can also use xmatch on its own when not combined with index and it works very similar to the match function on its own it's basically going to tell you what the row number is so the arguments are pretty similar lookup value look up arrays where we're going to find That which is just here my match mode is exact and I'm going to search let's do first to last this time close the bracket hit enter and it's going to tell me what row Google Docs resides in

from the top so pretty much the same results that you get with match but it's just a little bit more flexible you have a few more options in there so that is your introduction to two brand new functions in Excel 2021 In this lesson we're going to explore how the offset function works and offset is a function that you'll see quite often used on its own but a lot of the time you'll see it combined with other functions to produce some really powerful results so what exactly is the offset function and how does it work

well we're going to take a look at a basic example first of all and then I'm going to show you a more practical way Of using offset now the data that we're using in this first example is just some basic sales data for different regions across different months and what the offset function will basically allow you to do is return a result from a cell that is a specified number of rows or columns away from your starting cell now that is really hard to picture without seeing an example so let's just click somewhere over here

and type in equals offset Now notice here that we have five arguments and the last two are optional arguments because they're in those square brackets now the first piece of information this is the most important piece of information when you're using the offset function is the reference you always need to have a starting point a starting cell and that cell is used as your reference point now which cell you choose to use as a reference is entirely Up to you but for the purpose of this example I'm going to use cell A3 comma the next

argument is Rose so what I can say here is I can get this function to move down whatever number of rows I specify so if I want to for example let's say if I want to return the result for the North Region for March I need to move down three rows comma and I need to go across one column Comma I can then choose the height and the width of my range so for example if I choose a height of 1 and a width of 1 that's basically means one cell if I was to choose

a height of 2 and a width of 2 that would be a selection of four cells so if I close this bracket now and hit enter I should find that the result I get returned is the March value for the North Region and if I take a look at that just there that is exactly what I've got so you specify your starting point you specify how many rows you want to move down how many columns you want to move across and then basically how many cells you want to select from that point that can be

one cell or it can be multiple cells a range of cells so let's do it again and take a look at what happens if we select a range of cells so equals offset I'm going to use the same reference point A3 this time let's say I want to return the July figures for the South Region and I want to basically return July to December so Rose how many rows do I need to go down well one two three four five six I need to go down seven rows to get to July I want to return

them from the south region so I need to go across two columns now because I want to return all of the results from July to December the height is going to be one two three four five six cells effectively But I only want to return them from one column so it's going to be one for the width close the bracket hit enter and it's going to return all of those results those should exactly match what we have just there let's do it one more time so you get the hang of this equals offset let's choose

a different reference point this time let's choose cell E3 comma how many rows do I want to go down this Time well I'm going to select a random region in the middle so let's go down to the April value for the east region so I need to go down one two three four rows now I need to go back one column so for this we can use minus values if we need to go back so minus one I can then specify my column height and my column width now I'm going to say I want let's

just do two and two close the bracket let's see what we get So it's bringing back this range just here we moved down four rows we moved back one and then we said that we wanted a range that was two cells in height and two cells in width so that is basically how the offset function works now you might be thinking to yourself okay I get it that's totally fine but how is this function useful to me well let's take a look at a practical example now if we go across to this next spreadsheet you

can see here I have an Offset formula and I've combined it with a sum function and that's what I said you quite often see offset combined with other functions to create a really powerful formula for now what it's done here is it's looking at my little table and it's summing together the last three months of sales figures so basically these figures just there are being added together to produce this result now why would we use offset just here well it might be that With this data every month new sales figures get added to the end

and if I was to add another month on the bottom here so let's just drag this down and let's say 1500. notice that the sales figure has now updated to four thousand dollars so I've added a new value on the end it's still looking at the last three months if I select these cells you can see down in the status bar the sum is actually four thousand So it's adjusted the positions once I've added a new value onto the bottom and I haven't had to change anything in the formula now it's done that because I'm

using the offset function so I'm going to undo just to get rid of those values and let's go through how we constructed this now I'm combining offset with sum because I want to basically add up the last three months now for this example let's do the last six months that's what I want it to add up So we need to start this calculation with a sum function and then go straight into our offset so now we have our arguments let's choose a reference point I'm going to choose cell B3 comma we now need to specify

how many rows we want to count down now if I was just to put something in here like 5 this formula isn't going to work because that number is hard coded in it's not going to adjust its position when I add New data onto the bottom so here in order to find the rows we need to do a count a and we want to count all of the values in this range B4 to B15 comma Now I don't want to move across any columns so I'm going to put a 0 in here and then the

height well I want the last six months of data so we're going to go from the bottom because we want the last six months so effectively minus 6 needs to go in here and then our last Argument is width well it's the width of one column so we want to have a 1 on the end here let's close off our offset and close off our sum and hit enter so I'm getting a result of 6300 and if I check that simply by highlighting the last six months of value so one two three four five six

let's take a look in the status bar that's the quickest way the sum calculation there is six thousand three Hundred which matches my result in cell E4 now let's see what happens if I add small data onto the bottom of this table so I'm just going to add another month let's add a value of 2 000 in there now notice that this formula has an automatically updated to include that new value because now the last six months the sum of those six months should equal 7500 and my result is still showing the old total now

I can see that I've got a green Triangle in the corner so what I could do is click here click the triangle and I could update the formula to include the new cells that is one way of fixing this problem the other way that I could fix this would be to modify this formula so that my cell range extends past the last value that I have in here so instead of B4 to B15 I might change this to something like B 23 so let's go up to the formula bar and change B15 to b23 now

if I hit enter I get the correct Result because my new result is being included in the formula another way of doing this would be to use a table so if I click in my data set control a control T yes my table has headers let's click on OK and you can obviously change the formatting of that table if you want to what I can then do is add another month and the table Auto expands to accommodate that so when I add in a new Total you can see That now that total automatically updates let's

just double check that that is exactly the last six months and if I look down in that status bar that sum total yes 10 600. so you have three different methods there to get offset to update automatically you can click on that warning triangle you can extend the formula past the end of your data or you can put your data set into a table so that is a practical use of offset With the sum function in the last lesson of this section we're going to take a look at the indirect function now what the indirect

function does is it indirectly references another cell to return a result so let's take a look at a very basic example of indirect in action so I'm just going to go somewhere down here on the spreadsheet let's select cell I10 and I'm going to type in another cell reference so let's go for let's say k 10 In here now in cell K10 maybe I have a number like 300. so what I could do over here is I could use indirect and notice that we have two arguments the first argument is the reference text so I

could select this cell just here close the bracket and hit enter and the results I get is going to be 300 because I've indirectly referenced this cell over here the indirect function is referencing directly cell I10 but in Cell I10 we have a cell reference to cell K10 and cell K10 contains 300 which is why we're getting the result of 300 so that is indirect in its most basic form so again you might be looking at that and thinking okay I understand that but how is that going to be useful to me well let's take

a look at our first practical example what I have here are a number of sales managers and we have the different regions north south east and west and the amount of sales each of Those managers have generated and basically what I'm trying to do here is in cell H4 I want to pull back the total sales for whatever region I have in cell G4 now you might be thinking to yourself well can't you just do a sum calculation here well yes I could I could say equal sum we're looking for the north figures so I

could select this range just here close the bracket and hit enter and it's going to give me the total sales for the North Region notice in the formula that I have the different regions set up as named ranges now the drawback with this is if I was to change the region so let's change that to South my values don't update because I've got nothing in this formula which is referencing these region names so I can get around this by using indirect with sum so we're going to start out with some and we're going to go

straight in to indirect Now our first argument is the reference text so the reference text I'm going to use to do this sum calculation is the region that we have stored in cell G for let's close off our indirect function and close off our sum so if I hit enter now I'm getting the total sales for the south region and if I select this cell range and take a look down in the status bar I should find that my sum calculation matches what I have in cell H4 which it does now the Advantage of doing

it this way because we are indirectly referencing this range of cells via this cell just here if I change the regions if I change that to North the figures are all going to update so that is one practical example of how you can use the indirect function let's look at something now a little bit more complex now on this spreadsheet I have a list of different tours or the countries that these tools go to and I have how much those tools have generated In sales from January to July and right at the bottom I have

a totals row showing me the totals for each of those months now what I'm interested in when I'm looking at this worksheet are basically the total sales for the month just gone so effectively the current sales so the current sales is always going to be this value here it's going to be the total for the previous month now bear in mind this data is going to change each month so next month we're Going to have another column in here which is going to have all of the August figures so we need to build our formula

so that as we add columns of data in the current sales is always updating so it always moves across one across one across one to grab that total sales figure and we can use indirect to help us do this so let's click in cell K4 we're going to type in equals indirect now this time we're going to use both of These arguments now the first argument here is reference text now one thing you need to understand is when you're working in Excel there are two different ways that you can reference cells now the most common

way is to use cell references so A1 B2 C3 so on and so forth the other way that you can reference cells is to use what we call R1 C1 referencing and the only difference with this is that R1 C1 lets you specify the row and the column so if We just come out of here for a moment so you understand what I mean something that was written out like R 10 C 2 that would basically mean row number 10 column number two that is R1 C1 referencing now for this formula that we're constructing we

need to use that style of referencing so let's type in indirect there it is so the reference that we're going to be using this time is R1 C1 style referencing and what do We actually want to reference well we want to reference the total row that contains the value that we're interested in so the total row is row 15 but the column that we're choosing is going to change depending on how many columns of figures we have in this table and remember that's going to change each month so we need to do something a bit

different now when we're using this R1 C1 style we need to put this in quote marks So the first part of this is fairly straightforward we want to reference row number 15. but when it comes to the column that we want to reference I don't know the number of the column because it's going to change each month and we need to allow for that so I'm going to add some more quote marks and we're going to use the Ampersand to concatenate and then we're going to go straight into account a we're going to get Excel

to count the total number of Columns in order to find where that last column is and we're going to count in row 15. now the reason why I'm selecting the whole row here is because this is going to accommodate any new rows that we add let's close the bracket and then the last argument on the end here for this indirect function is the style of referencing that we're using now we're using r1c1 style in this case so we need a false argument on the end and let's Close off our indirect now this is a reasonably

complex formula that I'm showing you here this might be more suited to the advanced Excel course but I thought I'd throw this in here just so you can kind of get an idea as to how you can combine these functions together to get the result you need so let's hit enter and see what we get what we should get is the total for the last month which is July and I can see that yes we do now I'm just going to Apply a little bit of formatting so this looks the same so the way that

we've constructed this formula if I was to add another column in here so I'm just going to copy this across and let's change this so we've got August there and let's change some values so that we have a different total so let's say 5000 we'll go 10 000 in here let's drag the total across and would you take a look at that now this is Updated and it's showing me the new months total so we've introduced a lot of new Concepts in there we're just getting our head around our indirect Works we've also introduced the

new R1 C1 style of referencing and we've introduced a little bit of concatenation and how you can use count to find the last value in the last column and future proof this formula a little bit for when you add new columns onto the end this one is definitely one that you should Have a little practice and play around with so that you really understand exactly what you're doing when you're using this style of formula but hopefully that gives you a better idea as to how indirect works and a couple of practical examples of how you

can use it it's time now for us to do exercise too and in this exercise we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in relation to lookup functions so we have a table on this worksheet That just shows us some athlete names they're bib numbers the event that they ran in the route that they took and the position so this is really an athlete's finishing table and what I'd like you to do is in cell H3 I'd like you to create a data validation drop-down list that lists out all of the athletes

and just a quick tip here all of the athletes in column A are unique so we don't have any duplicates I'd then like you to construct a formula using a lookup Function of your choice so that when we select an athlete from the drop down it's going to return their bib number the route they took and their position and the final thing I'd like you to do is just add some error checking into your formula so it might be that you add if error or maybe you add if n a just to make sure that

if there is an error in this data we're handling that error with a meaningful message see how you get on With that and if you want to see my answer then please keep watching so the first thing we need to do here is create a data validation drop-down list in cell H3 that lists out all of the athletes so let's click in cell H3 up to data and into Data validation now we want to create a drop down list so let's select that from the menu and our source is going to be the athlete names

so Ctrl shift down arrow to select all Of them let's click on OK so now I should find that I have my little drop down list with all of the athletes listed out time now to move on to our lookup formula now for this example I'm going to use index and match but if you'd rather use vlookup or even X lookup then please feel free so we're going to do our index our array so what are we looking for here we're looking for the bib number so our array is going to be the bib Number

column B4 to B27 comma we now need to find the row number so we're going to go straight in with our match because we're going to match the athlete name that's going to be our lookup value we want to match the athlete name in The Athlete name column control shift down arrow comma we want to do an exact match of the athlete name close off Match close-off index and hit enter now it Says n a in there and if you remember I said I'd like you to add some error checking into these formulas so what

I'm going to do is I'm going to go straight up to the formula bar and we're just going to wrap this in an f and a and if we do come across an N A we wanted to say not found like so so now if I select an athlete I should find that it either tells me what their bib number is or if it can't find it in The table it's going to come up with not found let's complete our other two index and match formulas so equals index this time we're looking for the root

so that is going to be our array control shift down arrow comma we automate the finding of the row number by using match our lookup value is whatever we have in H3 we're looking up the athlete name in The Athlete name column and we want to do an Exact match close off Match close off index hit enter and remember you could also add your error checking into this formula let's do the final one this time I'm going to switch things up and I'm going to use a v lookup this time I need my lookup value

which I'm going to find in cell H3 my table array well this is my table array over here I'm going to select everything Which column do I want to return well I want to return the position and Counting from left to right I can see that this is column number five what type of match do I want to do well I want to do an exact match so we want a false argument on the end close the bracket hit enter and I get my result let's double check to make sure this is correct so let's

find Donald Holland his bib number is one zero nine zero he ran The East Loop root and he finished in position number seven in this section we're going to talk about sorting and filtering data because sorting and filtering are two of the primary tools when it comes to helping you analyze your data and we're going to start out in this lesson by running through how to sort on multiple columns now when we sort our data it basically allows us to organize our data into a more logical format that is a lot easier For us to

read and interpret and most of us know how to do a basic sort so for example if I wanted to sort this table of data by the last name in alphabetical order I could click in that column and then I have a few different options when it comes to sorting I could use my Home tab over in the editing group I have a sort and filter drop down and I can choose to sort that column in a to z order or Z to A I could also right click my mouse and I Have sort options

in here once again A to Z or Z to A and I have a third option of the data ribbon in the sort and filter group we have sort A to Z and Z to A buttons in here now I'm not going to demonstrate those because this is an intermediate course so by now we should know that that is how you do a basic sort what I want to focus on in this lesson is how we can do a more advanced sort where we're sorting on multiple columns so a Lot of the time when you're

faced with a data set you don't just simply want to sort by one column you want to sort by maybe two three four five so on and so forth and in fact you can sort by every single column in your data set if you wanted to so let's take a look at how we would perform a sort on multiple columns now for this particular saw you don't need to click in any column in particular and as we're already on the data tab I'm going to use the sort Button that we have in the sort and

filter group so when we click on this larger button it's going to open up this little sort dialog box and this allows us to choose which columns we want to sort on so if I click this first one where we have sort by it's going to show me all of the columns that I currently have in my data set so I want to sort by the last name first of all I can then choose what I want to sort on so I can sort on Cell values cell color font Color or a conditional formatting icon

now in this example we're going to sort on the cell value and then I can choose my sort Order A to Z Z to A or using a custom list and I'm going to show you how to sort using custom lists in the next lesson for the time being I'm just going to sort by last name A to Z now if I then want to sort by another column I can simply add a level and then repeat this process so once we've sorted by last name A to Z I might then want to Sort by

the city on the cell values A to Z add another level and this time let's sort by the town on the cell values but this time let's do Z to A and I could carry on going in the same way if I want to copy a level I can I have a copy level button above and that's just going to give me another one just here if I want to delete a sort I can select it and click delete level and I can also reorder my sorts so if I decide that I Want to sort

by the town first of all I can select it and move it up to the top of the list now I don't so let's put that back down again and then we have an options button in here as well which allows us to specify if our sort is case sensitive and we can also choose the orientation of our data so when I have my data organized in this way so vertically with my column headings in the columns I want to sort Top to bottom but if I had my data organized horizontally I could choose to

sort from left to right so don't forget about that options button so let's click on OK and see how that affects our data set well there we go so the first sort I did was to sort by last name A to Z and I can see that yes that looks to be correct I'm then sorting by City A to Z so this becomes more obvious when we go down to a last name where we have two entries so Here we have two entries where the last name begins with c and these two should be in

alphabetical order so East Sussex and then London the same here for Hernandez because we have two of them these are in a to z order and then finally we sorted by Town Z to A so our sort appears to be working correctly now you're not just limited to performing multiple sorts using the cell value for example if I had some rows in my data that had a background feel so I'm just going to go through and let's just fill these let's fill them with a bright yellow I'm just going to do a few rows just

here like that what I could do if I wanted to bring all of the highlighted rows to the top is I can sort by the cell color so once again let's right click this time and take a look at a different way of getting to our sort options I can right click go to sort and custom sort and what I'm going to do is just delete out the current Sorts that we have applied so now I can add a level I can choose to sort by and let's go for last name again but this time

instead of sorting on the cell values I'm going to sort by the cell color and then I get an additional box just here called order and that's going to pick up all of the background fill colors that I have in this data set so I only have one so I want to saw by the yellow background fill and I want to place those items at the top of the list Let's click on OK and it pulls those to the top now I'm going to undo a few times just to remove that yellow background shading because

the same works if the font is a different color as well so let's just make these a few of these red for example those ones just there and this time we're going to use the home ribbon in the editing group sort and filter and custom sort once again I'm going to delete out all Of these current sort levels add a new level I'm going to sort by the last name but this time we're going to sort by font color now when I click the drop down here you can see I have two options because my

heading rows contain a light blue colored font so I want to sort by the red font entrance I want them on top click on OK and those are pulled to the top of the list and in the same way if I had Conditional formatting icons in any of these cells on the conditional formatting icon and bring those interest to the top of the list as well so pretty easy to sort have a little play around with that and see how you get on so now we know how to sort on one column or multiple columns

the final sort option I want to show you is how to sort using your own custom list now what do we mean by sorting using a custom list well it might be that you have a data Set that you want sorted in a very specific way one that is outside the boundaries of Simply sorting A to Z or Z to A for example if we take column A just here you can see that I basically have three items Miss Mrs and Mr now if I want to sort this data set a to z I can

right click go to sort and A to Z and it's going to put the misses at the top the misters in the middle and the misses at the bottom if I right click and sort Z to A it's Going to put the misses at the top the misters in the middle and the Miss at the bottom now in either of those two options I don't get Mr at the top of my sort and what if I actually need that maybe I need to sort this list by Mr first then miss then misses well this is

where we can use a custom sort now the first thing you would need to do here is basically write out or type out your list in the sort order That you prefer so in a blank cell somewhere over here I'm going to write my sort order so I want Mr first then I want Miss and then I want misses and I can set this up as a custom list so to create a custom list we need to go into file down to options and into our advanced settings now if we scroll all the way down

to the bottom and it is quite a way down in the general section we can edit our custom Lists and custom lists are basically those lists that when you type the first one in you can then use your fill handle to drag down and complete the others and you might be more familiar with that when you're typing in dates or months of the year you can see that I also have some other custom lists that I've created in here as well so I'm going to set up my sort order as A custom list and because

I have them typed out in the cells over here I can choose to import them now you don't have to import them from cells in a spreadsheet you could choose to create your own new list and simply type the entries in this box here but we're going to import them so let's just simply select the list and click import so there is my new custom list let's click on OK And OK again so now I have those set up as a custom list what I can do is use that custom list as the sort order

for my data so on the Home tab let's go to sort and filter and into custom sort so now I'm going to sort by the title I want to sort on the cell values but the order I want to use is determined by a custom list I can then just simply select my custom list click on OK click on OK again and It's supplied my very specific sort order now if I was to go and delete these entries from here let's just delete those out it doesn't affect that sort order at all it's time now

to talk about two new functions in Excel 2021 and that is sort and sort by so now instead of using ribbons and commands in order to perform a sort we actually have some very specific functions which are going to help us Sort and sort and sort by are brand new functions in the latest version of Excel and they're part of a list of new Dynamic array functions now both of these functions are classed as lookup and reference functions so if you're looking for them in the functions Library you'll find them in the lookup and reference

group all the way at the bottom here sort and sort by so let's have a quick demonstration of both of These so you can see how they work and how they might be useful to you so let's start out with the sort function now the data that we're going to sort is again some very basic data we have some students we have the block that they reside in an exam that they've taken and their pass mark and we're going to use the sort function to sort these results now previously when we've been doing sorts we've

been right clicking and selecting different commands to use here And all of these commands really rely on you already having your data in the table in order to sort it now with this sort function and also the sort by function we can basically output this data into a different range of cells but the data that we output is going to be sorted as we want it to be organized so what I've done here is I've copied across the column headings into another range of cells and we're going to use the sort function to sort this

Data so let's click in block and type in equals sort now we have four arguments here and notice that three of those are optional arguments the only one that's mandatory is the array now the array is basically the cell range that contains the data that you want to sort so for this sort my array is going to be all of this information just here now notice that I'm not including the column Headings there I don't want those included in my sort now because that is the only mandatory argument I could stop my formula there and

close the bracket and if I hit enter it's going to sort my results effectively by that First Column the default is to sort my results by the first column A to Z so this list is now sorted by the block in A to Z sort order but that might be absolutely fine and if that's what you want to do then you can just leave it just there with one Argument however what if I want to sort by one of the other columns so maybe I want to sort by their Mark in descending order so I

have the highest Mark at the top going all the way down to the lowest so let's undo this is where we can use some of these other arguments so I'm going to select my array again that's this range just here comma sort index so this is where I tell Excel what Column I want to sort by and much like vlookup which numbers columns from left to right this works in the same way so my sort index is going to be a column number so if I want to sort by the mark column that is column

number four comma the sort order is where I can specify if I want to sort in ascending order or descending order well I want to sort in descending order because I want the Highest pass Mark at the top going down to the lowest so my argument here is minus 1. and then the final argument on the end which again you don't have to put in is if I want to sort by the column or sort by the row and I will say the majority of the time you're going to sort by the row so we

want a false argument on the end there let's close our bracket and hit enter and see what we get So now I have my results sorted in descending order by the mark so very simple and straightforward and because these are Dynamic arrays it means that if any of this data changes then my sort is also going to update so if I make a change to let's say the block just here maybe I want to have East Wing in here and hit enter notice how it's also changed in the sorted results now I'm going to undo

that Now what if I added another entry on the bottom here is my sort going to update well let's add East Wing at the bottom and press tab notice that it doesn't update now I could get around this problem by putting this data in a table first of all because remember with tables they Auto expand to accommodate any new information so let's do this again but let's put our Data into a table first of all so Ctrl T to create a table yes my table has headers click on OK you could go in and change

that formatting I'm not going to bother right now let's do our sort so let's say equal sort I want to sort by this range just here and notice now because I have this data in a table it's giving me the table name which is simply table two because I haven't renamed it my sort index well this time let's sort On the student name a to z so the student name column is column number two I'm going to sort A to Z so I'm going to say ascending order and I don't really need the last argument

on the end so let's just close the bracket and hit enter so now I have this list sorted by student A to Z and because this is in a table if I add another entry on the bottom so let's say East Wing as soon as I press tab take a look at that it automatically adds it to the bottom of this list let's just add the rest of these details I'll like so so think about incorporating tables if you want everything to dynamically update now when I'm making my table array selection just here I don't

necessarily always have to select the entire data set for example if I just wanted to extract the block and the student name When I do my sort over here when it comes to the array argument I don't have to select the entire table I could select just the columns that I want to sort so block and student let's go all the way down to the bottom again notice what I have in my formula it's giving me my formula name and then both of the column names I want to sort by the student name so that

is column number two and this time let's sort in descending Order -1 close the bracket hit enter and there we have our information sorted and just another point on that if I wanted to sort by these three columns let's just copy and paste those over there when I do the sort this time my array I only need the student the exam and the mark so I can select this array just here now when it comes to the next argument where we select the column the column isn't going to be column Number two it's column number

one of the selected array so our sort index in this case if we want to sort by the student is going to be column number one and then we can do our sort order let's say ascending and hit enter so a few different examples there of how to use that sort function now one little thing here is you cannot perform a sort on non-contiguous columns so you can't sort data that isn't next to each other So for example I couldn't have two column headings over here for let's say student and also mark because the student

column and the mark column have an exam column in between they're not adjacent they're not next to each other so now we know how sort Works let's take a look at sort by because it's a very similar thing now this function will allow us to specify which column we want to sort by so kind of similar to sort in many ways We have the same data so let's see what sort by can do for us now the first argument here is the array so again I'm going to select all of the data that I want

to sort our next argument is by array one so I can go in and choose the column that I want to sort by so maybe I want to sort by the mark so we're going to select this column and then we need to provide the sort order so I want to go from 100 down to The lowest Mark so we're going to say in descending order -1 comma my next argument is by array too so this method allows me to sort by multiple columns because my by array 2 argument will let me go in and

select another column a second column to sort by so this time I'm going to sort by the block so let's select that column and I'm going to do that in ascending order which is a one argument on the end And I could carry on going let's do another column I can choose another column to sort by so let's do the student name and I'm going to sort A to Z which is a 1 on the end there now I'm going to leave it there let's close the bracket and hit enter and there is my sorted

list I'm sorting by Mark then by block and then by student so now we've had a thorough look at sorting our data it's time to move on to Filtering now most of us are familiar with using the drop down arrows to filter our data sets and extract exactly the information that we're interested in but did you know that there is also an advanced filter option and in my opinion this is one of the most underrated commands in Excel because it's not something I see talked about very often so let's take a look at how the

advanced Filter Works because it has many uses Now in this first example I'm going to show you how you can use the advanced filter to extract a unique list of values from your data set so if we take a look at the table on the left hand side I have a list of sales reps I have the region that they belong to and then there's sales information now notice here in the sales rep column I have the sales rep names repeated over and over again so technically there's only roughly five sales reps they're Just repeated

throughout this data now maybe I want to extract from this column just a unique list of all of the sales reps and I find this is something I have to do all the time now we can extract a unique list using excel's Advanced filter so let's take a look at that first of all so if I click somewhere over here I'm going to say unique list of sales reps and then underneath here I just want the five or so names of the sales reps So what we can do here is jump up to the data

Tab and in the sort and filter group we have an advanced filter option and you can see here with the screen tip it says it contains options for filtering using complex criteria so let's click on Advanced now the thing with this Advanced filter when this little pane opens up is it does hold in it the last criteria you used so we're going to delete that out in a moment but the first thing we need to specify is What action we want to perform now do I want to filter this list in place or do I

want to copy it to another location well I want to extract a unique list of the sales rep names to a different cell so we want to copy to another location and then we have three blank fields to complete now when you're extracting a unique list of Records we only actually need to complete two of these and the first one is the list range so where are the Values that we want to extract well they're in the sales rep column now for this one we don't need to specify any criteria but we do need to

let Excel know where we want to copy these unique values to and I want to copy them to this cell just here F 11 and the most important thing is to make sure you select unique records only when we click on OK take a look at that I now have my unique list now there is a way to do the exact same thing by using A formula and this is again one of those new formulas in Excel 2021 and I'm going to show you how that works in the next lesson but for the time being

you can also use your Advanced filter to extract a unique list of values now what else can we use this Advanced filter for because that is by no means all we can do with this well let's jump across to our next worksheet where we have the same data we can also use the advanced filter to Extract values based on specific pieces of criteria and the way this works is you have to have your criteria listed out in your spreadsheet so you can see here in this little table over here I want to extract from this

table all of the records where the region is Asia and the sales total is greater than seven thousand and we can do this again using our Advanced filter so I'm going to click Somewhere underneath let's click on advanced now I want to copy to another location so let's make sure we select that underneath action and then I'm just going to delete out all of this old criteria now for this one we are going to utilize all three of these boxes now the first thing we want to select is the information we want to extract well

I want to extract the date the Sales rep the region and the sales information so basically everything in my table so my list range is going to be my entire table I then need to specify my criteria range and I have my criteria listed in this small table just above so I need to select the entire little table then I can specify where I want to copy these results to so let's click on Cell F9 I don't need to select unique records this time Because that's not what we're doing all I need to do here

is click on OK and take a look at that I now have a filtered list that's showing me just the records where the region is Asia and the sales are over seven thousand so effectively what we've done here is a filter using and criteria filter for Asia and sales greater than seven thousand now I can also filter using or criteria so let's take a look at what that would look like as well so I'm just Going to clear everything from here and let's change our filter criteria now if you want to do an or your

criteria needs to be listed one above the other so maybe I want to filter for records where the sales rep is Ben or Deb and let's just keep our formatting consistent let's just apply that and let's also apply that like so so now I have these in here it's going to do an or filter So let's go back to our data tab into advanced and we're basically going to do a very similar thing we're going to copy to another location and let's remove all of these I like to start from a clean slate and list

range we want to pull back all of the information so we select the entire table our criteria range is this table just here and we want to copy to this cell and click on OK and now I should find That my filtered results are only for the sales reps Ben or Deb so that is how the advanced Filter Works it's great for extracting unique lists of information but it's also great for filtering data using more complex criteria in the last lesson I showed you how you can use the advanced filter to extract a unique list

of values and I mentioned in that lesson that now in Excel we have a brand new for Excel 2021 function that'll do exactly the Same thing and not surprisingly it's called the unique function and I have to say that if I need to extract a list of unique values This Is My go-to Method I don't tend to use the advanced filter as much as I do unique and I'm sure this is one of those functions that you're going to find yourself using all the time now the unique function does exactly the same as the advanced

filter it lets us extract a Unique list of values so if I want to use the unique function to extract a unique list of all of the sales reps all I need to do is click in a cell and type equals unique press the Tab Key notice I have three arguments now the last two arguments are optional arguments they are showing in square brackets so if you simply just want to extract a unique list you only need to specify the array argument So the array argument is basically the column that contains the unique values B5

to B 28. so all I need to do is Select it close the bracket hit enter and I get my unique list of values and because this is a dynamic array if any of these were to change this list is going to update as well so if I was to change one of these to mark you can see it now adds Mark onto the end of the unique list of sales reps now once again if I was to add something to The bottom of this list so if I just drag this down and let's say

Matthew it's not going to update that unique list because we've chosen to extract this unique list from this range only it stops short of any new items added onto the end so of course we could combine this with a table which will Auto expand and our Dynamic array will update automatically so let's just take a look at that let's click in our data control T yes my table Has headers let's click on ok now I'm going to give my table a name so let's click on table design and in the table name group let's call

this sales reps and hit enter so now I can use this table and this will be completely dynamic so I want to extract my unique list from the sales rep column and notice because I've put this data into a table The annotation is different it's showing me the table name which is sales reps and Then I have the column that I've selected in square brackets so if I close this and hit enter I get that same unique list but if I was to add another entry on the bottom so let's just drag this down and

add in Matthew when I press the Tab Key you can see that that unique list now dynamically updates so just bear that in mind when you're working with this unique function now as I mentioned when you're using unique There are some other arguments some optional arguments that we have so let's just take a look at how those work so let's type equals unique again [Music] the array well let's stick with the sales rep column comma now I can specify if I want to return unique columns or unique rows so if I was to choose the

true argument here to return the unique columns if I Had column headings that were repeated running across the top I could use the true argument just to extract the unique columns I will say that most of the time you're going to use this to return unique rows and that is in fact the default if you don't specify this option so let's just type in false and the last argument we have here allows us to either return items that appear exactly once in our range or return every distinct item So if I want to return the

six individual sales reps I would use the false argument and again that one is the default if you don't specify anything but what about if I just wanted to see sales reps that appeared exactly once in my selected range and because I've just added Matthew on the bottom here he only occurs once in this list so if I just wanted to see Matthew I could use true on the end here because it's going to pull back values That occur exactly once hit enter oh I actually have two yes I do I've got Mark in here

he only occurs once as well and also Matthew so those are the additional arguments that you have when using the unique function a super useful function that I think you're going to find yourself using all the time in the final lesson of this section I'm going to show you how you can use yet another new function in Excel 2021 there Are so many of them in this latest release and that is the filter function now we've seen how we can use our drop down arrows to filter we've seen how we can use the advanced filter

to extract filtered results and now I'm going to show you how you can utilize the filter function to do a similar thing so let's start out basic and then we'll build up into a more complex filter so we're going to use our good old student Data again and what I'm aiming to do here is I want to filter for all students who sat the English exam and I want to Output that list of students into this range of cells over here and we're going to use the filter function in order to do that so let's

click in cell H5 and type in equals filter now for this particular function we have three arguments with the last one being optional now the first argument here is the array So what results do we want returned well I actually want all of the results returned because I want to know the block the student the exam and the mark so the array is going to be everything in this table A5 to D 29 and remember if you do want to make this completely Dynamic then you can put this data into a table beforehand comma now

we need to tell Excel what we want to include so this is effectively where We specify what we're filtering by now we're filtering by the exam English so we need to say we want to include the exam and we select the range here when it equals English now I've got mine listed out in a cell if you wanted to hard code this in you could just simply type in English in here and put it in quote marks and it would effectively do exactly the same thing but as we have it listed in a Cell I'm

going to use the cell reference now those are the only two mandatory arguments so I could close off my bracket and get my results but let's just take a look at that final optional argument if empty so what we can do here additionally is specify what we want it to say if the result of this filter is nothing so if it doesn't match the word English in this table what do we want it to say so I'm just going to say just produce a Blank cell so two quote marks let's close the bracket hit enter

and see what we get now take a look at that I'm now getting a list of all of these students that sat the English exam so this works really well and if anything changes within this data then this is going to update but if we add new values to the bottom we would need to make sure this data is in a table in order to get our filter to update dynamically so that is how you Can use the filter function when you have one piece of criteria so in the next example let's take a look

at how we can filter by multiple pieces of criteria multiple columns effectively so let's jump across to the next worksheet so now let's just delete out these results I have pretty much the same thing but we've added in a piece of criteria now we want to filter for all the students that's at the English exam who reside in The west block so we have two pieces of criteria so we need to structure our formula in a slightly different way so let's type in equals and filter again the first thing we need to specify here is

our array what do we want to return well I want to return everything so we're going to select all of the data now we need to specify what we want to include so this is where we set up our filter or in this case filters because We have two now because we have multiple filters we need to enclose them within brackets so our first filter is the exam so we need to select the exam range and that needs to equal English close our bracket that is our first filter we now need to specify our second

filter and we separate our two filters with a multiplication sign Let's open our bracket and do our next filter so this second filter we're filtering for the block west so we need to select the block range and that needs to equal West close off the bracket now I could carry on going if I had more pieces of criteria I would just type in another multiplication sign and carry on going but we only have two in this example Let's press comma and let's specify what we wanted to say if it doesn't find any records now this

time I wanted to say no records and that needs to go in quotes and close off our bracket let's hit enter and there we go we have our results list and if this exam changes so maybe now I want to see the results for the French exam that's going to update and the East block maybe I want to see results for the maths exam now take a look at that The maths exam for the East block has no records now I do have a small typo there so let's just retype that to make sure that

still works yes it does so this is all extremely Dynamic now in the final example of using filter I want to apply three filters this time but I also want to sort my results and we can do this by combining the filter and the sort functions together so this time I want to filter for all students that's at the English exam who are located in the west Block and who have a pass mark That's greater than 50. so let's click and the first thing we need to type in here is we need to type sort

and then go straight into our filter what are we filtering for what do we want to return well we want to return everything in this list comma now we can set up our filters and this time we have three separate filters now remember if you have multiple Filters they need to be enclosed in Brackets so our first filter is going to be when the exam equals English that's our first filter we separate our separate filters with an asterisk and now we can specify our second filter so when the block equals West close off that filter

and we have a Third one so Asterix again open a bracket when the mark is greater than 50. close the bracket comma we now have that optional argument where we can specify what we want it to return if it doesn't find any results so I'm just going to say once again no records Let's close off our filter and we're now back into as sort so this is where we can specify exactly how we want this list sorted and what I'm going to say is here once I get my filtered results I want to sort them

in descending order by the mark so the first argument for sort is the array now the array is going to be generated by that filter function so we can press comma to move on to the next argument this is where we specify the sort index Of the column that we want to sort by and remember when we were looking at sort numbers columns from left to right so I want to sort by the mark column which is column number four comma now I can specify if I want to saw in ascending or descending order well

I want to sort in descending order so we want a minus 1 in here comma we do have an optional argument on The end here we don't actually need this so I'm not going to add it let's close off our sort hit enter and take a look at our results so we're only seeing the English exam for the West flock and the marks are all above 50 and they're sorted in descending order by the mark So if I change this filter and take this Mark up to 80 you can see my results update let's put

that back down to 50. if I change the block to East I get one Result if I change the exam to French I get a different set of results so we've managed to really effectively combine that filter and sort to get a really nice filtered and sorted list using Dynamic functions it's time now to do exercise three where we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in this section on sorting and filtering so there are a couple of different things I'd like you to do here Once again we have on the left

hand side just a small table it shows me some countries listed out the regions those countries belong to the revenue and the profit that they've generated and the first thing I'd like you to do here is I'd like you to create a unique list of all of the regions and I'd like you to do that using an Excel function and then once you have that unique list I'd like you to use that list to create a data validation drop down list in cell F4 and then finally if we cast our eyes over to the right

hand side notice that I have the same column headings running across the top I'd like you to create a filter that filters results by the region selected in cell F4 and I'd like you to include a meaningful message so that if there are no records we don't get an error we get a message that says no records so to give you a little bit of an idea as to which direction to go in you're going to need to be using the Unique function and also the filter function to complete this exercise and then the second

part of this exercise is sorting data so once again we have similar information and I want you to use the sort by function to sort the athletes by root and position in ascending order so now is the time to pause the video give the exercise a go and if you get stuck or you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching so the first thing we need to do here is We need to create a unique list of the regions so to do this I'm going to kind of go over here so I so

I'm in a blank space and I'm going to use the unique function now for this all we need to do is to select the range so we want a unique list of the regions so Ctrl shift down arrow I'm working up in the formula bar now close the bracket hit enter and there is my unique list So now I want to use this unique list to create a data validation drop-down list in cell F4 so let's click in seller for up to data into Data validation we're going to create a list and the source for

our list is going to be a unique list in column M click on OK and now I have my little drop down arrow and I can select my different regions remember if you don't want these visible in column M you can simply right click And hide that column now the second part of this exercise was to create a filter that filters the results by the region selected in F4 and I want you to add a meaningful message if there are no records so what we're going to do here is we're going to use the filter

function now for this our array is going to be everything that we have in this table and then we need to tell the function what it is we want to include so I basically want to include all the Records where the region is australasia so I'm going to include the region when it's equal to whatever we have in cell F4 comma what do I want it to do if it's empty well I want to add a message that says no records and close the bracket let's hit enter and would you take a look at that

it's picked out all of those results from the table and because this is dynamic if I Change the region to Europe I'm going to get an updated list of results the second part of this exercise was to sort our data and I want you to use the sort by function to do this I'm going to sort the athletes by their route and position in ascending order so once again in cell G4 we're going to use the sort by formula my array well this is going to be all of my data so let's select everything that

we have in here I'm Going to work up in that formula bar comma what do I want to sort by well I want to sort by two things I want to sort by the root and position in ascending order so the by array 1 argument is going to be the root so let's select everything that we have just there comma sort order one well I want to sort in ascending order so we're going to add a 1 just there comma by array two so now I want to Solve by the position so we're going to

select the position column comma and I want to sort by sending order again so a 1 on the end there close the bracket hit enter and would you take a look at that we're now sorting by root first of all in alphabetical order so I have East Loop first and then West Loop and then we're sorting by the position in this section of the course we're going to delve into date and time in a Little bit more detail and we're going to take a look at some date and time functions a bit later on in

this section but in this introductory lesson I just want to make sure that we all understand the theory behind dates and times in Excel because it does work a little bit different so on this worksheet I have a small table with three column headings a short date long date and time now currently I don't have any date or time formatting applied to these numbers And this is the first rule when it comes to dates and times in Excel they are essentially just plain numbers underneath they become dates and times when we apply the appropriate formatting

so if you've ever received a spreadsheet from a colleague or a client and you've looked in the date column and you see numbers which look something similar to this and you've wondered why those were there it's because this column doesn't have date formatting applied to it if I Take a look up on the home ribbon in the number group you can see that currently I just have General formatting applied so whilst these are dates they're not displaying correctly because I don't have date formatting applied now what exactly are these numbers well the way the Excel

works is that it takes the first of the first 1900 as day number one and all days are numbered from that point respectively so the numbers that you see in here are basically the number Of days passed the 1st of January 1900 and if you have incorrect formatting applied to date sales you're going to see that underlying number as opposed to the actual date now notice if I select this column of numbers go to my numbering drop down I have two options in here short date or long date so let's start out by applying short

date format and now those look a little bit better we could do a similar thing but apply a long date format as well so we have Those same numbers let's go to the drop down and we can apply long date formats I need to make this column a little bit wider by double clicking and now I get the longer version of the date and there are tons of different date and time formats that we can use which we're going to take more of a look at in the next lesson now in the third column just

here we have some times and these look a little bit different from the dates but they are effectively still numbers But the difference with times is that when we don't have time formatting applied which we don't in this column we just have General formatting applied again all times are a fraction of one so let me show you what I mean by that I've got this little fractions column just here and I've just added some numbers so we have 0 then 0.25.3.4.5 all the way up to one now if I just select these and let's just

make a copy of those cells if I apply time Formatting to these like so you're going to see what those fractions equate to so 12 am according to excel is 0.25 which is essentially a quarter of a 24-hour period to excel is 6 AM 0.3 is 7 12 0.5 so halfway through the day is 12 p.m and then when we get to number one we're back to 12 a.m so Excel stores times as values between 0 and 1. they're effectively fractions so again if you see a spreadsheet that Has times that looks something like this

this is what those numbers represent now let's Supply the correct formatting to these as well I'm going to press Ctrl shift down arrow to select all of the data up to the drop down and this time we're going to use time and now those times look a little bit better so that is the basis of how Excel stores dates and times in your spreadsheet they're stored as values and we get them to look like dates and times by applying the Correct formatting so now we understand how dates and times are stored in Excel let's move

on to taking a bit of a closer look at custom formatting and I'm also going to show you just a couple of little really useful keyboard shortcuts for quickly applying some common date functions so if we start at the top of this spreadsheet you can see I have a little table here it says date time date and time now I'm Going to show you a couple of functions here which are a really quick way of inputting today's date and today's time and I'm going to show you a couple of different methods one Dynamic and one

not now if you want to put today's date into a cell there is a formula to help us do that and that formula is simply called today now the today formula doesn't have any arguments but we do still need to have An open bracket and a closed bracket on the end now if I hit enter it's going to show me today's date now when you're using this formula this is a dynamic formula which means it's going to update according to your system time so if I was to open this worksheet tomorrow that date is going

to have changed to tomorrow's date now more often than not that's super useful because it means you're not having to Update it every single day but there are occasions where you might want to hard code that day into a cell so for example in the accounting industry a lot of time there is a need to have a historical date in the spreadsheet so we can still use the today function for that but we need to use the keyboard shortcuts as opposed to typing the function in so if I want to hard code into the cell

today's date meaning it's never going to Change the keyboard shortcut is control semicolon now I have similar functions for the time as well so if I want to input into a cell the current time which updates automatically depending on the day and the current time I would use the function called now and again this is a function that has no arguments we can simply input it and it's going to give us the date and the time if I want to hard code the time Into a spreadsheet so that it doesn't change again we can use

a keyboard shortcut Ctrl shift semicolon now if I wanted to hard code both the date and the time into this spreadsheet I can just combine those keyboard shortcuts so I would enter the date first of all control semicolon space and then the time control shift semicolon and hit enter now what about if I wanted to change the formatting on these dates and times for example the date that we have At the top here currently I have date formatting selected and I'm using short date format now we've already seen how we could change that to Long

date format if we wanted to Simply by selecting that option but we do have more options underneath the custom tab in formatting now to get to custom you can either click the drop down and go to more number formats at the bottom or Alternatively you can click on the little diagonal arrow in the corner and go to the number tab and right at the bottom here we have a custom section and this is really where you can customize the formatting that's applied to the cell and you can really go to town here now it's worth

noting that these aren't just for dates and times you can customize formatting for pretty much Anything that you have in a Cell but there is a little group down here specifically related to dates and times now if we click on this first one you can see the format there is month day and year and in the sample just above it's going to show us how that's going to affect the value that we have in the selected cell if I click on the one below that's going to change it to a completely different Format so now

we have 8 Jan 22. the next one down is just 8 Jan the next one down Jan 22 and you'll notice these are kind of set out as little pieces of code so the d stands for the day the m stands for the month and the y stands for the year and how many of these you type in changes the format of this date so if I decided I wanted this format where we have the word Jan which equates to three M's if I wanted that to say Jan 2022 I don't have a preset option

for That but I could change it up here now because I just have two y's it's giving me the last two characters of the year if I add another y take a look at what happens just above I get the full year if I add another one if that makes more sense to you it's going to stay the same thing so you can completely customize how your formatting looks let's click on okay I could do the same for the date and the time now I think in this one I'm just going to add the time

so let's just Do Ctrl shift semicolon so we just have the time in here now my time is currently displaying as 11 38 PM but again I could jump into custom and I could use one of these time options down here so if I want to display in a 24-hour clock I have an option for that if I want to display the seconds I can do that so on and so forth so I think I'm going to display using the 24 hour clock and click on OK let's Supply some more custom formats to our invoice

tracker table below now I'm going to select all of these dates and this time I'm going to click the drop down more number formats and let's go to custom so what about if I want to display this date as 0 1 0 4 20 20. well let me have a quick look through some of these I don't think I have one that looks exactly as I want it to look So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go up to this type field I'm going to add in another M see what that does

that's exactly right 0 1 is displaying now so if I go to D and add another D I get the 0 4. and if I just wanted it to say 0 1 0 4 20 I could delete out two of these y's and click on OK and I've completely customized that formatting now custom formatting can get a lot more complex than what we've done just there But in terms of this intermediate course that's pretty much all you're going to need to know at this stage so jump into custom formatting have a little play around with

some dates and times and really make sure you understand how you can modify the formatting so that your values look exactly the way you want them to look in this lesson we're going to blast through some of the most useful date and time functions in Excel And we're pretty much going to cover most of the date and time functions that you're going to come across so on this worksheet we have a column column A that contains a date and this date is currently in short date format and we then have an invoice total and what

I want to do is I want to extract certain parts of this date into separate columns and we're going to do this using date functions now the majority of these that I'm going to show You rely on the fact that we have the full date in column A because we're going to use this column as our reference point to extract the various different parts of this date so effectively we're breaking up this date into its different parts I'm going to show you a function in a moment that kind of does the opposite so if you

have things like the day number the month number and the year how you can combine them all together into a short date Format but let's not get too far ahead of ourselves let's run through all of these different functions so in column C we want to extract the day number from the date in column A so we have a function called day now notice there is only one argument for this and that is serial number and this is slightly misleading because what Excel means by a serial number is just the cell that contains the date

so in This case A4 close the bracket hit enter it's extracting the day part of this date so in this case 10. I can then double click which is going to copy that formula down and extract the days for the rest of the date super easy now what if I want to extract the day name from this date and what I mean by the day name is Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday so on and so forth now this works in a slightly different Way because if the answer that you want to extract from a date is

a text-based answer such as the day name or maybe the month name you need to use the text formula this function has two arguments value and then format text now the value again is just the cell that we want to extract from and then we need to provide the format for this day so this is where those mmms and ddds come in again so if we're extracting the day we want To use the D but how many D's we use will determine if I get mon m-o-n or Monday and this needs to go in quote

marks because it is essentially text now if I type in 3DS first of all and close my quotes and hit enter I'm going to get the short version of the day name let's double click to edit if I was to add another D in here and hit enter I get the long day name and then I can double click to copy that down so just remember that when you're trying To extract things from dates if it's text you need to use the text function let's move across to the next column because this time we want

to extract the month number and for this we use the month function again one argument which is the serial number A4 close the bracket hit enter and we get the month number part of this date now once again the next thing that we're extracting is the month name so this is going to be January February March and This is text so we need to use the text function again let's select our value which is A4 and then we can choose our format which needs to go in quote marks so this time we're doing with the

month so we want M's in here if I do three M's I'm going to get the short version of the month so Jan Feb ma if I put four M's I'm going to get the long version of the month let's hit enter and then of course I can double click to copy that down Really straightforward the next one is super easy we're extracting the year and we have a year function you guessed it serial number close the bracket hit enter and it's going to extract the year parts of that date and then finally I can

extract the weekday number and we can do that using the weekday function now the first argument here is the serial number so we need the date again and now we can specify how we number our weekdays now I tend to number mine as in Monday is one all the way through to Sunday being seven but some people in different parts of the world number their weekdays differently some people might start their week on a Sunday and so that is number one to them some people might start on a Thursday so on and so forth and

this is the argument where you can specify exactly that so if I choose to put a 2 in here as this argument it's going to number Monday as 1 through to Sunday seven and that is Exactly what I want close the bracket hit enter and now I get the weekday number double click so if I just take a quick look at this this first one is four and yes Thursday according to me is day number four and if I wanted to get super fancy and this will even give us a chance to practice a quick

if statement I could type in an if statement here which tells me if this date effectively in column A is a weekend or a weekday So what I could say here is equals if my logical test well what I can say is if the weekday is greater than five if that is true then yes it's the weekend if it's not then no it isn't because Saturday and Sunday are effectively numbered six and seven so if I hit enter and then copy this down I should find that most of these are no except when we get

to anything That is a six or a seven which will be yes because these represent Saturday and Sunday so some really useful functions in there now I mentioned earlier that we can in fact do the reverse of that and combine values together to create a date so if we take a look at this table at the top here you can see I have the year in one column the month in another column and the day in another column so what I can do here is use the date Function and all I need to do is

specify the cell so the year is cell K4 the month is L4 and the day is M4 close the bracket hit enter and I get that date which I can double click and copy down I could do exactly the same for time so equals time we need to specify the hour the minute and the seconds close bracket hit enter And there I get my times super useful functions now let's jump across to the time functions worksheet because I just want to finish off by showing you how we can do pretty much exactly the same but

this time using time as our serial number so I have some times in this First Column and we can break those down using more functions in Excel so the first one is the our function again it just requires a serial number And it's going to pull out of that the hour double click to copy down we have a minute function again serial number is required and we can double click to copy that down and then finally we can add the seconds by using the second function serial number close the bracket hit enter and then we

can double click to copy that down now because of the way that I have these times these last two are just showing Zeros and that is actually correct it's really only this First Column that has different values in it in this lesson we're going to take a look at a couple of really quick little formulas that can be super useful and that is the workday function and the work days int function so let's start out with the workdays function now in the table at the top here I have a list of tasks that need to

be completed and I also have the start date of those Tasks so maybe this is some kind of basis for a project plan and in column C I've listed out the number of work days that each of these tasks is going to take now when I say work days I mean Monday to Friday so excluding the weekends and what I want to work out is the Finish date based on the work days and the start date so the workdays formula will basically calculate five days after the start date But it won't include any weekends in

that calculation so let's go to finish date we're going to type in equals and we're going to use the work day function now we have three arguments here start date days and then we have an optional argument of holidays because what you can also do in here is get the formula to exclude holiday days as well so those might be public holidays Christmas Day New Year's Day Easter Monday things like that now in order to include the Holidays you need to have the holidays listed out somewhere so you can see that I have all of

the holidays in the UK listed out in a little table so the first argument here is the start date so I have that listed in cell B4 comma days so how many days is this task going to take well this task is going to take five days now I could leave it just there I could close the bracket and hit enter and it's going to give me my finished Day excluding weekends however if I wanted to include holiday days as well let's double click to edit comma I can then select the holiday dates so that

is this little range just here hit enter and then I can copy this formula down and I have my finished dates so that is how the work days function works now what about the workdays int function well let's delete our finished date just Here and take a look at work days int and it's this one just here sorry workday dot Intel let's double click now this is pretty much the same but it takes into account International weekends and holidays so the first argument is start date so before that's nice and easy number of days well

that is five comma Now the third argument is weekend so if you have weekends that start on a different day so maybe your weekend isn't Saturday and Sunday in Your location I know in the Middle East and other places Sunday and Monday tend to be the weekend you can account for that by selecting different days for your weekend so let's just do Sunday and Monday for a change and then if I want to add in holidays I can do that as well so I might want to use these holiday dates again close the bracket and

hit enter and then I can copy that formula down once again I'm going to get that little Arrow because I'm not using all of the data so let's do ignore error so that's the difference between workdays and work days International in the previous lesson we saw how we could return a finish date using the work days and workday International functions when we have a start date and the number of work days now in this lesson we're basically going to do something very similar using two different functions Network days and Network Days International now this is

very similar except we start with a start date and also an end date and these formulas work out the number of days it's going to take to complete the task so in the table underneath again we have some task names just here we have the start date for that task the end date for that task and I want to know how many days it's going to take to complete this task so how many days between these two dates effectively and Again these two formulas will exclude the weekends and any holidays if you specify them so

let's start out with network days these are very straight for forward formulas there it is we have three arguments again this time we have the start date which is B18 comma we need our end date which we have in c18 and again we have that optional argument on the end to include holidays now I'm going to select all of these Here and something I didn't actually do in the last lesson when I did this is I really need to lock these cell references in place because I am going to drag this formula down and I

don't want this range moving so I did forget to do that last time so if you spotted that well done let's press the F4 key to lock those in place close the bracket and hit enter now notice I have something weird in here if I double click to copy down I have some dates in Here in 1900 which is odd now why am I getting that well if we take a look up at the Home tab it's because I accidentally applied date formatting to these cells so all I need to do is switch this back

to General and then I get the actual numbers and network Days International is pretty much the same but again this accounts for people in other locations so let's select this again we need a start date Comma we need our end date and then we can specify our weekend days so again if you're in a different location where your weekend days are not Saturday and Sunday you can just choose those from this list and then if you want to you can add in your holiday days F4 let's remember to lock close the bracket hit enter and

then I can copy those down so again two super simple but really useful functions that everybody needs to know The date diff function in Excel will help you work out the difference between two dates and this is a little bit of a weird function and I'll explain to you why in a moment before we get on to that let's take a look at the data so in this table I have some employee numbers I have the employee's first name their last name and their date of birth and what I want to do is I want

to work Out how old they are so what is their age based off of their date of birth but also using today's date so at the top of the spreadsheet I have today's date and I'm using the today function to get that date now in this type of scenario it's going to be more beneficial for me to use the function today as opposed to hard coding today's day in because I want this age to update as the current day changes and it's this piece Of information today's date and the date of birth that we need

in order to construct this formula now as I mentioned this is a bit of a strange formula and you'll notice why straight away so if we type equals and then we want to type in date diff notice that nothing comes up underneath normally when I type in a function Excel recognizes it in the functions library And it shows me underneath for example if I was typing in vlookup you can see underneath it says vlookup whereas when we do date div it doesn't it also means I can't press the Tab Key to put my first parentheses

in I need to add in the bracket now as soon as I add that in it does come up with date diff underneath but it doesn't show me any arguments so basically this function doesn't exist in Excel's information Library although the function does exist which is very very strange so effectively when we're constructing this it's one of those cases where you either know or you don't because you're not going to get any help with regards to the arguments you need to provide this function now fortunately this is a very simple function our first argument is

going to be the date of birth which is D6 Comma our second argument is going to be today's date so B three [Music] and now we need to tell the formula what format we want to display this result in now my result I want the people's ages so effectively I want this in year format so in quote marks if I type in 1y and close the quotes that is my formula let's hit enter and See what we get looks pretty good now can I double click to copy this down no I cannot why can't I

do that let's undo what if I double click to take a look at this formula you can see here that with cell B3 which is where we have the today function I haven't made this absolute so when I copy this formula down the cell reference for B3 is also going to start Moving down into these first names so that is why we're getting an error so all I really need to do here is make B3 absolute by pressing the F4 key let's hit enter and try that again double click to copy down and there we

go I now have everybody's ages in here so just remember with that function you don't get any help with regards to arguments and the thing that I find quite difficult here it's not too bad on This example but sometimes when I'm trying to use day diff I tend to get the cell references round the wrong way I can never really remember if the date of birth is supposed to go first or if today's date is supposed to go first but the only thing I can suggest to you there is just try it out if it

doesn't work switch them around the other way now another thing if I double click to edit this if I wanted to show their age in months I don't know why I'd want to Do that but if I did I would just substitute the Y for an m and hit enter and it's going to show me their age in months so Mac Berry is effectively 216 months old if I wanted to show their age in days I would substitute that with a d and there we go Mac is 6580 days old so don't forget that you

can change format from here as well now for this type of calculation there is another way You can do this so I'll just finish off by showing you this as well because you might find it a bit easier let's control shift down arrow and delete everything out what I could do is sometimes you don't even need to use a formula if you want to work out the difference between two dates so what I could do is today's date minus the date of birth now notice that's going to give me my result in days So what

else would I need to do to this formula to get this to display as years well I could divide it by 365. if I just do divided by 365 because of the way Excel works out calculations that's not going to be quite correct so what I need to do here is I need to enclose the first part of this formula in Brackets so Excel is going to do the B3 minus D6 first of all and then it's going to Divide the result by 365. and what I also need to do is lock the cell reference

for today's date let's hit enter we can double click to copy those down and then all I need to do is just have a little play around with the formatting so I'm going to switch these to a number and then take those decimal places down which is going to give me the same result so two different ways there that you can work out the difference between two Dates two other functions in Excel that can be super useful when you're trying to calculate dates are EO month and E date so let's take a look at EO

month first of all now EO month basically stands for end of month and in this example on the screen what I basically have here is a loan amortization schedule now don't worry too much if you're not sure what this is we are actually going to look in great Detail at how we put together one of these a bit later on in this course but basically what this does is it works out the monthly payments for a loan that's not particularly important in this example but using the EO month function to work out the payment date

is so if we take a look at this table this is basically our schedule table and what this tells me is how much I'm going to be paying each month how much of that payment is going to be interest How much the principal loan the loan amount effectively is being reduced by and then the ending balance and what I want to add in here are the payment numbers and also the payment date and this loan is going to be paid on the last day of every single month now as we're doing this I just want

to show you a couple of other little bonus tricks as well if I take a look at the table above over the course of this loan we're going to be making 360 payments so effectively this is a 30-year loan so what I want in the payment number is I want numbers 0 to 360 listed out here now I could go through and start typing in 0 1 2 but that's obviously going to take me a long time there are other ways I could do this I could type in the first few so one two three

I can select them all and then I can drag those down but still dragging down to 360 is a little bit tedious So a little trick that you might want to use if you need to get a lot of numbers into a spreadsheet let's type in the first one I'm going to press Ctrl enter to stay in the same cell and what I'm going to do is grab the little fill handle in the corner and using the right Mouse click button I'm going to click drag down a cell drag back up a cell and let

go and it opens up this secret menu and if I click series I can then select columns and then choose my step value so We're going to step one each time and my stop value is 360. when I click on OK take a look at that if I do control down arrow notice its input all those numbers all the way down to 360. so that's a really neat little trick now what I want to do is I want to enter in the dates for each of these payments now again if we look at the table

at the top the start date of the loan is October the 31st 2021 so let's put that in as our first Payment date so we want 10 31 20 21. now if I want to fill all of these down if I was to drag this date down notice what it does it goes to the next day so we have October 31st then November the 1st November the 2nd November the 3rd so on and so forth now I don't want it to do that what I want is for it to input the last day of the

month so one of the ways that I could do this is to use the function EO month so let's type in equals EO month The first thing we need to specify is a start date now I'm just going to use this one up in the table D12 and because I'm going to drag this down I don't want this to move so let's lock it now this little screen tip is in the way so we can just drag that down I now need to specify the month that I want to pull the end date from now

if I was to put a 0 in here and close the bracket and hit enter it's going to give me October the 31st now I don't want That I want this one to be the end of November so let's double click and let's adjust what we have on the end here let's change that to a one and there we go that's what I get so if you want it to input the last day of the current month you would use a zero if you want it to input the last day of the next month you

would use one so on and so forth now what happens if I try and drag this down it doesn't work now why is that Well if we double click to take a look at this formula it's because I'm using the date up here in the table and I've locked it so it's always referring back to this date so really what I should probably do here is if we delete that out I'm going to use the date above and hit enter and now if I double click to copy that down I should get the last date

in every single month and if we take a look at February it's picked up that February only has 28 days and it's Also worth noting that if this is a leap year Excel does recognize leap years and we'll have the 29th in there instead so EO month a really good formula for just listing out the last day of every month let's move across to the e-date worksheet now this is kind of similar this is where you can start with the date and then you can return a date a specified number of months before or after

that date so let's click in the cell and type in E-date whoops like so two arguments start date and months so start date is going to be A5 number of months well if I put 2 in here and close the bracket notice it gives me a number and that's because I don't have these cells formatted as dates so let's deal with that straight away let's jump up to here and change these to short date and would you look at that it's now Giving me a date that is two months ahead of the start date let's

do it again e-date start date comma How many months this time we want three close the bracket hit enter if I want 10 you get the idea start date 10 . now what about if I want to go back well we can do pretty much the same Thing so we want e-date then we want the start date and what I can say here is minus one close the bracket hit enter and I get the month before let's do it one more time e-date start date and this time we're going back four months and hit enter

and then of course I can grab all of these formulas in one go and copy them down Simon Says subscribe and click on the Bell icon to receive notifications we've made the files the instructor uses in this tutorial available for free just click the link below in the video details to get these hello everyone and a very warm welcome to this course on Excel 2021 Advanced my name is Deborah Ashby and I'm an IT trainer and Microsoft subject matter expert with over 25 years experience of using and training Excel to students Customers and delegates all

over the world and I am very much looking forward to hosting this course for you and what a course we have for you if you're looking to upskill and move out of the catch-all intermediate Excel user category and become an absolute Guru then this is the course for you and we're going to dive straight into the good stuff first we're going to start out by taking a look at the new Dynamic array functions available in Excel 2021 So things like unique filter sort sort by X lookup and so many more we'll see how to combine

functions together and create complex lookups we'll delve into the world of statistical and math functions and explore functions like round aggregate Rank and count blank and if your thirst for formulas is not quenched by that stage I'm going to show you two brand new game-changing Excel functions let and Lambda the latter lets you create your own functions without The need for any programming knowledge it's truly brilliant now of course no Advanced course would be complete without at least taking a minor tour through some of the more advanced features of pivot tables and pivot chart techniques

and I'm going to show you how you can add more interaction into your worksheets by using things like form controls and we'll finish out this course by taking a look at importing data from external sources transforming It in power query and will also predict the future with forecasting and learn the basics of automating our tedious tasks using macros and VBA so there is so much for us to cover now all of the files that I use in the videos are available for you to download from the course files folder so if you want to follow

along with me then you can also at the end of each section there is an exercise so you can practice the Skills that you've learned so with all that said and without further Ado grab yourself a drink and I will see you in the first lesson the first exercise in this course is less of an exercise and more of a way to set ourselves up for Success throughout this course so I just want you to check if you prerequisites before we begin now the first thing you need to make sure you do is that you

download the course and the exercise files to your PC You'll find them in a folder within this course just make sure that you save them off to a folder on your PC that's easily accessible the second thing you need to check is the skill level of this course this course is very much designed for advanced Excel users so we won't be covering a lot of the basic things so basic formulas things like customizing the quick access toolbar and using basic functionality like cart copy paste so make sure that you do at least have an Intermediate

level knowledge of excel before attempting to run through this course and if you need to we do have an Excel 2021 for beginners and an Excel 2021 intermediate course for you to review if required and finally ensure that you're using the correct version there are so many different versions of excel out there this course is very much designed for Excel 2021 which is the latest Standalone version from Microsoft I will say that if you've come to this course and you have a Microsoft 365 account then the course is pretty much the same because the Standalone

version of excel 2021 was really designed to bring it in line with the features and functionality in the Microsoft 365 version of excel so once you've checked all of those things you are pretty much good to go for the next section you'll want to download the course exercise files click The link below in the video description to get these you can also scroll through the details to find timestamps for each section in this course if you're enjoying this training please leave us a comment in 2018 Microsoft rolled out a version of excel with six new

Dynamic array functions and a new calculation engine that allows us to write one formula and get multiple results and it really is a game changer because it eliminates the Need for the CSE method to calculate array formulas and CSE stands for control shift enter being able to write a single formula and getting an array of dynamic results means writing fewer formulas and that also means fewer errors and what it generally leads to is more trustworthy spreadsheets so Dynamic arrays make formulas much easier to write and they solve some really hard problems in Excel now it

is Worth noting that Dynamic arrays and all of the new functions are only available in Excel for Microsoft 365 so if you have a Microsoft 365 subscription you should have access to these new Dynamic arrays and also in this version of excel Excel 2021 and as part of the dynamic array update Excel now includes six new functions which Leverage The Power of dynamic arrays and you can see the six new Dynamic array functions listed out on the slide just here So we have sequence which will generate an array of sequential numbers Rand array which will

generate an array of random numbers unique which is one of my favorite new Dynamic arrays which will extract unique values from a list or range we have a sort function which will sort a range by column sort by which is going to sort a range by another range or another array and finally we have the filter function which will filter data and return Matching records so what we're going to focus on in this section is just going through each of these new Dynamic arrays so you understand how they work and how they can be helpful

to you before we begin it's important to understand spills and arrays because this is probably going to be new terminology for you in Excel formulas that return multiple values will spill these values directly Onto the worksheet now that might not make too much sense to you at the moment so let's take a look at a couple of examples so I'm going to show you an example of just a regular Formula First of all or a standard formula so in this first little table we have some employee names and what I want to do is I'm

just going to return their Department from the cell table that we have over on the right hand side So what I could do here is just a very simple Villa cup so we're going to type equals vlookup our lookup value is going to be the employee name we're going to look up that value in this table over here and you can see that because I've named my table employee location that's what I'm getting in the formula as opposed to the cell references I need to provide the column index number so what information do I want

to Return well I want to return the department which is column number two and am I doing an approximate or an exact match of the lookup value the employee name well I'm doing an exact match so I can put 0 or false on the end here so I'm just going to go with zero let's close the bracket and hit enter and it pulls back I T as the department and what I can do here is just drag this down to fill out those other departments for the rest of the employees now this Is what we

call a standard Excel formula when we construct it the answer just appears in one cell and if we want to copy that to other cells we have to use our fill handle or other methods in Excel in order to do that Dynamic array formulas work in a very different way which you're going to see in a moment before we get on to that let's just take a look at one other type of formula and that is a CSE array and this might be something that you're already aware of The CSE part stands for control shift

enter because it's always been in Excel if we want to perform multiple calculations within one formula we need to press Ctrl shift enter to make that into an array formula and this is something that historically many people have found quite confusing so let's have a look at a CSE array so you can understand exactly what they do if you're not sure now in this little table we just have Again some basic products we have the quantity that's been sold and we have the price of each of those products so if I want to find out

what the overall total is of all of the products this would involve two different calculations because I need to multiply the quantity by the price for the first product and I need to do that for all of these different products and then I need to do a sum calculation to add up all of those totals now we could do this Calculation all in one go using a CSE array so what I'm going to do here is we're going to say equals sum and all I would need to do is select all of the quantities multiplied

by all of the prices now in order to get this to work and to calculate correctly we would need to make this a CSE array which means we need to press Ctrl shift enter and not just enter so let's do that Ctrl shift enter and we get our total So CSE control shift enter allows us to combine multiple calculations in one formula and another thing with these CSE array is you can always tell if you do have a CSE formula because if you look at the formula bar you'll notice that your formula is encased in

these curly brackets so that tells you that it's an array formula now bearing in mind both of these examples that we've looked at this is going to give you a better understanding of how spills work with Dynamic arrays and what I'm going to show you is a very basic example of a filter Dynamic array now I'm going to move through this section fairly quickly but don't worry if you're not really understanding what I'm doing because we do have an entire lesson dedicated to this filter function a bit later on and we'll go through it slowly

and we'll break it down really what I'm trying to get you to understand in this lesson is just the concept of how spills work So what we're going to do is we're going to return the employee the department and the block from this table depending on what we have selected in column K so we're going to use one of the new Dynamic array formulas and that is filter so let's type it in we need to select our array which is going to be everything in this table and then I need to tell Excel what I

want to include so I'm just going to filter for all of the employees in the Marketing department so we're going to select the department array and that has to equal what we have in cell K4 and that's all I'm gonna do there are lots of other things we can do with filter and lots of other arguments we can use but just for this basic example let's close off our bracket and hit enter notice the results spill into multiple cells so I don't just have one formula in one cell like I did when I was doing

the vlookup and this is Effectively a CSC array because I'm performing multiple calculations in one formula and the results have spilled down into multiple cells if I was to change this department to let's say sales and hit enter those results will update so everything is fully Dynamic and if we click in our results notice that we get this blue border around the outside this is effectively showing us what our spill range is that is the terminology and this spill range will Expand and contract when necessary where new values are added or removed so if I

was to add another name to the bottom of this table everything should update so let's do that I'm going to go down to the bottom here let's just add Adam foreign and we're going to put him in sales and what we should see is that this employee's table will update and there we go he's added on to the end let's put him in the East block like so let's take A look at a couple of other examples of spills I'm going to jump across to the spills worksheet and notice that we have a little table

just here and that's just listing out some first names and some last names of different employees now notice that the first names are in lowercase and the last names are in what we call proper case now I want everything in this first name column to be in proper case and I also want to sort this list of names into Alphabetical order a to z so the first thing I'm going to do here is put this data into a table Ctrl T let's click on OK okay and I'm going to change the colors because those aren't

particularly nice let's just change those to a purple color now I'm not going to name my table for this example we'll just leave it on table two and let's tidy up this data so we're going to combine two things here We're going to use another new Dynamic array called sort by and we're also going to make that first name column proper text so let's type in proper as well and we're going to select everything that we have in here close off our proper I'm now back into my sort by formula so I can choose which

column I want to sort by so I want to sort by the last name comma and do I want to sort in ascending Or descending order well I want to sort in ascending close off sort by hit enter now take a look at those results it's converted that first name into proper case the results have spilled across both columns and it's also sorted the list by the last name A to Z Now one other thing to notice is if you wanted to go in and edit this formula if I click in a Cell down here

within the spill range note the formula is kind of grayed out in the Formula bar you always must go to the first cell that contains the formula in order to edit it then you can double click and you can make your changes now one other thing to note here is if I then wanted to do something like maybe account on these names let's type in count a I'm going to select everything in this table notice what Excel does take a look at that notation it's put a pound or a hash symbol in there and what

that basically Tells us is that we're referencing a dynamic array now if I was to press enter here I'm going to get a result of 22 because it's counting each of these individual items now that wouldn't be what I would want in this case I just want to know how many members of Staff we have so I could go in here and I can do a divided by two and that's going to give me the correct result of 11. now what about if I was to add more names to this table And you'll notice at

the bottom here I just have a little list so let's drag this up and because our original data is in a table that table is going to Auto expand to accommodate those new names but take a look at what's happened just here we now have a spill error in column d now why do we have that if we click on it take a look at the range if you look at the blue lines Around the outside you can see that because I have another table underneath there isn't enough room for these results to spill down

so this can easily be fixed simply by moving this table out of the way so if we pick this up and let's just drag it over here now I get my spill results also notice that my count has updated as well so everything here is completely Dynamic so that's kind of how spills work hopefully you can now understand That and see the difference between just a standard formula CSE arrays and dynamic arrays in this lesson and the next few lessons we're going to be taking a closer look at the unique function because this is such

an amazing formula for extracting unique values from a range of cells and this is something which I've always thought should be a lot simpler than it is in Excel previous to the release of this new Unique Dynamic function it can be quite tricky to get a unique list of values from a range now with the introduction of unique the process is so much simpler so let's start out in this lesson by taking a look at a couple of basic examples of how unique works so in column A I have a list of countries and one

thing you'll notice about this list of countries is that those entries are not unique so we have the UK repeated a Few times we have the USA repeated a few times so on and so forth so if I just want to extract a unique list of all of the values from the range in column A I can use the unique Dynamic function so let's click in cell c three we're going to type in equals and then use unique so let's start to type this in notice it comes up in the list we can press our

Tab Key to select it and we have three Arguments for this particular function Now notice that the last two are optional because they are in square brackets and in this first basic example we're not going to use those optional arguments we're just going to go for the first one which is array so all this basically means is select the range that you want to extract the unique values from so we're going to select range A3 to a 19. let's close off our unique function hit enter and like magic we now have a Unique list that

is a lot shorter than our original list because we're just seeing the nine unique country names notice that this is a dynamic function so we have this blue area around the outside showing me my Dynamic array range now notice here that I don't have my list of country names in a table and if we take a look at the unique formula you can see it's just referencing a standard cell range A3 to a19 now there are so many advantages to putting your Data into a table for example if this country list updates so let's add

another country onto the end we're going to add Brazil and hit enter notice that my unique list doesn't update however if I put this into a table then it means that when I change anything in column A or I add new countries to the bottom this unique list will also update so let's put this data into a table Ctrl T yes my table has headers let's click On OK I'm going to leave the formatting as it is that's absolutely fine now notice this unique list hasn't automatically updated with that new entry for Brazil as I'm

still referencing just the cell range as opposed to the table so let's construct our unique again I'm going to delete the formula out let's go for equals unique this time when I select my range notice it's going to give me the table name now I didn't rename my table so it's just called table one and then we have the column heading in those square brackets so country I now have Brazil on the bottom but if I add another country so let's go for Argentina hit enter notice that that now updates so if you really want

to make everything completely Dynamic it's always worth putting your data into a table just one of the many advantages of using tables in Excel definitely one of my favorite Things now another little tip here this range of sales is essentially a dynamic array and it might be either you want to use this data in other calculations or maybe you just don't want to have a formula underneath this list of values what we can do is we can throw away the underlying formula so we just have a unique list as plain text effectively so how do

we do that when we do it using paste special so I'm going to select my unique list Ctrl C to copy And if we go up to the Home tab click the lower half of the paste button I'm going to choose to paste values only so when I click this let's press escape to deselect I now just have this as a plain text list if we take a look in cell C3 I no longer have the unique formula listed there now of course this means that it's not linked to this table anymore so if I

add any other country names onto the bottoms let's add Thailand It's not going to update but there are many situations where you just might want to use the unique formula to extract the list but you actually just want to have those plain values so don't forget about that little paste special trick now the final thing I want to show you in this first lesson is how we can use unique and count together so maybe I want to count the list of unique entries so we can combine both functions so we're going to start out With

account a because we're going to be counting text and then we want to go straight into our unique formula now I could select this unique list but I'm going to select this one over here in the table let's close off unique close off our count hit enter and it's telling me that I have 12 entries which would be correct because this unique list contains 11 entries you can see that information down in the status bar We also added Thailand which would make it 12. so we can combine unique with many other functions in Excel to

make it more useful and get the results that we want the unique function can essentially do two things it can extract unique values or it can extract distinct values so what is the difference between these two well distinct means I want all entrants in the source data one time So for example if the UK is listed out three times in a Range I only want to show it once so we're getting a list of unique values whereas unique means show everything in the source data that appears only one time so a good example of that

in our data would be South Africa that appears only once in this list and so that would be included in the results of the unique formula now you might be thinking to Yourself well didn't we just use the unique formula to extract a distinct list of values which we extracted all entries from our range of data regardless of how many times they're listed in the range well yes we did but in these examples we're going to be using more of the unique arguments so we're going to start with distinct but first of all we're going

to put our data into a table control T yes my table has headers let's click on OK and I'm going To choose a different table style because I don't particularly like this one let's go for a dark one this time and I'm going to give my table a name so let's call it country underscore population and hit enter so now let's extract a distinct list first and then compare it to what we get when we extract a unique list so we're still using the unique function we're going to select our array so we're going to

stick with extracting the Country names and notice now because I've named that table I have the table name and then the column name comma let's move on to the next argument which is by Colin so do we want to return unique columns or unique rows well I want to return unique rows so we're going to have false in there comma now this is where we can choose if we're doing distinct or unique so a true argument will return the items That appear exactly once whereas a false argument will return every distinct item so we're doing

distinct so let's type in false close the bracket hit enter and now we get a list of all of those distinct values let's compare this list to what happens when we use a different argument so we're going to do unique again we're going to select the same range we want to return unique rows so we still want a false just here but this time we Want to return items that appear exactly once in the range so we're going to use true instead and let's hit enter so this list is much shorter because it's only returning

countries that appear exactly once in the selected range whereas distinct will show all of the countries regardless of how many times they appear in the examples that we've looked at so far we've been using the unique function to extract just one list of values so We've been extracting a unique list of countries but in this lesson I just want to show you how simple it is to extract multiple pieces of criteria using unique and once again we can either extract distinct values or unique values so if we take a look at our table we have

our list of countries but this time we have some additional information we have the population of each of those countries in column B and then the region or the continent that those Countries belong to in column C and what I want to do is I want to extract all three of these columns or all three of these pieces of information into the table on the right hand side so once again the first thing I would probably do here is put this data in a table Ctrl T let's click on OK and once again I'm going

to change this table style let's just change this to something fairly plain in fact I don't think I'm going to have any table style this time let's Name our table we're going to call this uh country underscore population underscore region and let's hit enter so now if we use unique we need to select our array now because I want to extract multiple pieces of criteria I want to extract all three columns my array is going to be all three columns so effectively the entire table if I only wanted to extract two columns I would just

select two columns comma Do I want to return unique columns or unique rows well I want to return unique rows so we need a false in here and this time I want to extract every distinct item so once again we're going to add a false close the bracket hit enter and those results spill down and it's going to pull through the other pieces of criteria and of course because we put our information into a table I could add additional countries onto the bottom so Let's add Spain and it's going to update so everything is still

completely Dynamic now let's just undo just to get rid of Spain and once again you can see that that disappears now if we change this so I'm going to edit the formula remember you can only edit the formula in that first cell if I click somewhere else the formula is grayed out let's double click I'm going to change this last argument from false To True press enter and now we get that much shorter list again because it's only pulling out of this data countries that appear once and once again if I was to add Spain

onto the bottom because that does appear only once it's going to populate in this table so super simple to use unique and extract multiple pieces of criteria it doesn't just apply to one column so far in this section we've been using The unique function to extract values by row so in this lesson I'd just like to show you a couple of examples of how we can extract information by column so let's take a look at our information first of all so at the top here I have a small table and this table represents some Crayon

packs and each crayon pack contains a number of different colored crayons and we can see here for pack one all of the different crayons and there are six in each pack all of the Different colors of those crayons and we have eight different packs with different color combinations and notice the difference here is that our information is running horizontally across the page so when we're using unique we want to extract our information by column as opposed to by row and this pretty much Works in exactly the same way as the examples we've seen in the

previous lessons we're just using a different Argument so let's extract the distinct crayon packs first of all so we're going to type in equals and then we're going to go with unique press add Tab Key our array is going to be all of the crayons and notice I haven't put this in a table so I'm getting the cell range here instead of a table name let's press comma now this is where the difference lies in previous examples we've been Using that false argument to return unique rows but this time we want to look down the

columns we want it to check each color in the pack to see if that is unique or not so we want to use the true argument just here comma and we want a distinct list so we're going to do a false argument just here close off the bracket hit enter and here are our results now I'm going to select all of this dynamic range and let's just move this along Just so it's a bit easier to compare with the table above so the results that we have here are basically packs that are distinct now notice

it's only brought back effectively six packs so that means that I have two packs that are the same in my data and I can see here that yes I do so pack two contains these crayons black purple green yellow red and blue and I also have the same combination of colored crayons in pack eight So instead of returning this twice it's just returned it once in my formula results so that accounts for one of the missing results but what about the other one well I can see here that pack one has this color combination and

pack four has exactly the same color combination so again that is why we only have six results as opposed to eight so let's take a look at the final option here this time we're going to return all of the unique crayon packs So again this works in a fairly similar way equals unique our array is going to be our different colored crayons this time we're going to return the unique columns so we want a true argument in here now remember when you're adding these true or false arguments you can represent true with a 1 and

false with a zero so if I put a one in there it's going to work exactly the same now this time I want to return the unique list so I want to return Items that appear exactly once so this is a true argument as well I'm going to use a 1 for that also let's close off our bracket hit enter and now I get an even smaller list so these are the crayon packs that appear exactly once in this table so it's basically omitted anything that is a repeat pack so it's brought back four packs

of crayons we have a total of eight so four packs are essentially duplicates and that would be correct Because again pack one and pack four are duplicated as our pack two and pack eight so extremely simple to search with that buy column argument as opposed to by row it's time now to move on to talking about another Dynamic array function and that is sort so most Excel users are used to sorting lists of data we can simply click anywhere in our data and then on the data tab we have various different sort options we can

sort A to Z we can sort Z to A or if we want to do a more complex sort we can sort by multiple columns so bearing that in mind why is it useful to have a specific function that allows us to sort our data well with a sort function it means that we're not restricted to keeping our data in one location we can basically sort it and place that data anywhere on the worksheet we can also use the sort function with other functions so maybe we want to extract a unique list of Values from

a range and then sort that list of values we can combine them both together because we're using functions so let's take a look at how a basic sort works now what I have here is a small table of data this is very much inspired by the Winter Olympics that are currently on TV I will say that these are not actual athletes bib numbers or medals that they achieved this is just some dummy data but that is where my inspiration for this example is coming From so we have in column A listed out some athletes we

have the country that they're participating for we have their bib number and then we have the medal that they achieved and what I'm going to do first is just a very basic sort I want to Output this information in the table on the right hand side but I want to sort the results A to Z by the country so let's click in cell F4 and type in equals sort now notice with the Sort function we have four arguments and three of those arguments are optional because we have those square brackets so let's take a look

at this in its most basic form we're just going to use the one mandatory argument first of all and that is the array so if I just wanted to do a simple sort on the athlete name I could select the range close off the bracket hit enter and it's just going to sort those names by the Default sort which is a to z now we want to do something a little bit more complex than this so let's delete it out we're going to go back into sort and we're going to use all of the arguments

now I want to sort all of the data so my array is going to be everything that we have in this table I can then choose the column that I want to sort this data by and this is kind of similar to vlookup in a way in that the columns in the table are numbered from Left to right so the athlete column is column number one country is column number two bib number is three middle is four so depending on which column you want to sort by that is the sort index that you would use

so I want to sort this list by country so my sort index is column number two my next argument is the sort order so if I want to sort in ascending or descending order Now I want to sort in ascending order so that is a 1. comma and our final argument is just do we want to sort by the column or by the row well I want to sort by the row so we're going to type in false just here close off the bracket let's hit enter and now I get those results sorted in ascending

order by country so we have Australia at the top going all the way down to USA at the bottom so really nice and simple and if at this stage I decided that I wanted to Maybe sort by a completely different column maybe I want to sort in descending order by the bib number I can simply edit the formula so I'm going to click on this first cell let's edit it up in the formula bar the first argument here is fine that is just the array the sort index well column number two that needs to be

changed because we now want to sort by the bib number so that's going to be column number three now the sort order if we want to sort in Descending order that is minus one and then we still want the false argument on the end because we're sorting by row so now if I press enter all of those are going to update and you can see that it's now sorted by bib number in descending order so we have the highest number bib number at the top all the way down to the lowest so pretty straightforward now

let's just go down to this second table that we need to complete now notice here it just says Sort by country descending order nice and easy we've already done this so let's do this and see what we get our array again is going to be everything in this table sort index where we want to sort by the country so that is column number two our sort order where we want to sort them in descending order so minus one and we want to sort by row so we have a false or a zero argument on the

end now what happens when I press enter I'm Getting a spill error and if you remember back to one of our earlier lessons in general we get this if there isn't enough room for those results to spill down and I can see that if I click on Cell a22 take a look at that blue border it's kind of overlapping the table that I have underneath so what I really need to do here to get these to spill properly is move this data out the way so let's just grab this and move it and now all

of my results update and you Can see that they're sorted in descending order by Country Now the final example I want to show you here is how we can sort by multiple different columns so so far we've simply been sorting by one column or another so the first example we sorted by bib number the second one we sorted by country but what if I now want to sort the list by country in ascending order and then by bib number in descending order how do we add in multiple pieces of sort Criteria well this is actually

pretty straightforward so let's go back into our sort function our array is still going to be the same thing so we're going to select everything now we need to provide our sort index and because we want to sort by two different columns we want to sort by country and we want to sort by bib number we need to put these in curly brackets so we want our first curly bracket and then we specify all of the columns that We want to sort by so the country column is column number two but we also want to

solve by the bib number column which is column number three let's close our curly bracket and then we can specify the saw order for both of these columns so again we need a curly bracket we want to sort by the country column in ascending order so ascending is one and we want to sort by the bib number in descending order which Is minus one let's close off that Curly bracket comma do we want to sort by column or by row we want to sort by row so we need a false argument on the end and

we can close off as sort so let's just review that formula we're selecting the range that we want to sort we're then putting inside the first pair of curly brackets The Columns that we want to sort by and then in the second pair of curly brackets we're specifying the sort order for each of those columns Let's press enter and take a look at our results so we're sorting by country in ascending so I should have a to z which is correct and then we're sorting by bib number and that is in descending order so if

we take a look at Canada's bib numbers for example we should find that they go from the highest to the lowest and of course with this formula again if we take a look at it in the formula bar if you wanted to sort by three or four different columns you could simply add More column numbers and more sort orders in between these curly brackets so pretty nice and simple to be able to use the sort function and sort by multiple columns in this example we're going to use the sort function to sort data horizontally and

in this lesson in the process of doing this we're going to be utilizing a couple of other functions that we haven't yet spoken about so before we begin let's start out by understanding The data so here I have a small table we have some movie names listed in column A and then we have actors that have been in each of these movies and I've just listed out four actors to keep this data set manageable now what am I aiming to do with this data well what I want to do is effectively find out which actors

have been in the same movie together more than once now if I have a list of data that looks like this it's quite difficult to be Able to determine that simply by using arise so we're going to need to use a formula or a couple of different formulas and techniques in Excel to help us out with this and because there are a few steps I've listed those out at the bottom so the first thing I want to do is I want to take this first movie La La Land and I can see the four actors

that we have for that particular movie I want to take this range of actors and I want to sort The data horizontally in ascending order so effectively I should have Emma Stone listed first so over in this little table we're going to type in equals sort we're going to open our bracket and this time the only thing we want to sort is this first row B4 to E4 now do I need to provide a sort index here am I sorting on any particular column no I'm not so I don't have to add anything in for

my saw index I can just press Another comma to move on to the next argument now do I want to sort these horizontally in ascending or descending order well I want to sort them in ascending order so we need a 1 just here comma and we're sorting by row or am I sorting by column well this time I'm sorting by column so this needs to be a true argument on the end let's close off our bracket hit enter and see what we get so now I basically have those four Actors sorted A to Z Now

what I can do is just select all of these and use my fill handle and drag down and it's going to apply that same sort to all of the actors in the rest of the movies and notice that it's sorting by the actor's first name as opposed to their last name there still isn't the solution to what I'm trying to find out which is which actors have been in the same movie together more than once so we need to do a few more things here to achieve our Goal now the next thing I'm going to

do I'm going to take this horizontally sorted list of actors and I'm going to basically join the text in each row together and for this I'm going to use the text join function text join is kind of similar in many ways to something like concatenate or concat as it's now known it will join pieces of text in different cells together but we have a few different arguments that we can use now a way that I can do this is to join all of the text together so it's in one cell I can then sort that

data and highlight the duplicate cells so quite a few different steps there so what I'm going to do is I'm going to edit the sort formula and we're going to join all of these actors names together so they're effectively all in one cell and we're going to do that by adding in the text join function now the first argument of text Join is to specify a delimiter so do we want our actors separated with a space or a comma or a dash well I don't want them separated with anything I just want them in a

horizontal list next to each other so I'm just going to press comma to move on to the next argument do I want to ignore empty cells well I don't have any empty cells in my data set but it's not going to hurt for to do a true argument just there comma Now the Next argument is text one now text one is going to be generated by the sort so I can click right at the end here and I just need to close off my text join let's hit enter and now all I need to do

is double click to copy this down and would you take a look at that I now essentially have all of the actors together in one cell so now that I have all this text joined together I'm going to select it all Ctrl C and I'm just going to paste in and I'm going to use That paste special technique to paste just the values over the top so now I've essentially thrown away the underlying text join and sort formula now that I have my data like this I can use my regular sorting options on the data

Tab and I'm going to sort it A to Z now this makes it quite a bit easier for me to see all of the actors that have been in the same movie and because we have a fairly short list I can see that right at the bottom here those names are All the same and the same for this one just here if you wanted to make this really obvious you could apply some conditional formatting which will highlight duplicate values so let's select our data up to conditional formatting and we're going to select duplicate values I'm

happy with this film of Light Red film with dark red text click on OK and now I can see the actors that have been in the same movies so these four actors have all been in The movies the interview and super bad and these four actors have all been in Burn After Reading and Insurgent so quite a few steps to get to this place but this is something that can come in very useful when you're working with real life data in the last few lessons we've been taking a look at how we can use the

sort function to sort data in Excel and now it's time to move on to taking a look at another new Dynamic function Which is very similar to sort and that is the sort by function so what exactly is the difference between sort and sort by well if you recall in these sorts that we've done using the sort function we can either choose to sort in ascending or descending order Now sort by differs from this because instead of selecting ascending or descending we can choose another range or another array to sort by instead so let's take

a look at an example now the Data set I'm using in this example is basically some very well known books we have the book title in column A we have the author of the book in column B we have the genre that the book falls into in column C we have when it was first published in column D and then in columns e to I we have the number of one to five star ratings that the book has received so we're going to use the sort by function to sort this data so let's take a

look at sort by let's Explore the arguments and let's take a look at a few different examples so let's type in equals sort by now for this one we have three arguments now there are actually more arguments than three if you take a look at the end there we have those three little dots which basically tells us that there are more now the last argument and all of the ones that we can't see are all optional arguments the only two mandatory arguments are array and by Array one so array is the data that we want

to sort if you take a look just above I have two column headings book and author so that is the only information I'm interested in seeing so my array is simply going to be the book and the author columns comma now I can choose a column to sort this by so instead of ascending or descending like we provide when we're doing just a regular sort this time we can sort by a column So maybe I want to sort this data by the number of five star reviews so I'm going to choose the five star column

comma and now I can choose how I want to sort this column so do I want to have the most five star reviews at the top or the least five star reviews at the top well I'm going to sort this in descending order so we have a minus one now if I was to press comma here notice that it goes on to buy array too so we Can sort or we can use this function to sort our range on multiple different columns now we're going to do that in a moment for the time being let's

just keep it simple and just sort by the five star column let's close off our sort by hit enter and now you can see what we get so at the top here we have Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban and if I take a look in my data set let's take a look at the five star reviews well I can See that this one has a thousand five star reviews and a quick look down through the rest of the numbers that is definitely the highest so I don't necessarily have to have the value the

number of five star reviews output into this table in order to sort the data by this column so this makes it very simple for me to see for example the top five books based on five star reviews let's do another sort I'm going to delete this out I'm going to go into sort by again Again the array is just the book and the author because that's the only information that I'm interested in we can choose what we want to sort by so maybe this time I want to sort by genre and I want to sort

in ascending order of the genre comma and now I want to sort by something else so maybe I want to see which is the worst performing genre so which one has the most one star reviews So my second sword is going to be by the one star review array comma and I'm going to sort this in descending order let's close the bracket hit enter and see what we get so the first sort we did here was 8z by genre so if we take a look at she a history of Adventure let's find that in the

table I can see the genre is Adventure and because that begins with a it's at the top of the list the next one is The Catcher in the Rye and if we find that In the table it's right at the bottom that is the coming of age genre which is C so I can see that these are going down in A to Z order but we're then sorting them by one star reviews as well and if we take a look at she a history of Adventure I can see that yes this has by far the

most one star reviews if we take a look at some books that are all by the same author so for example Harry Potter I can see that the Harry Potter book that's received the most one Star reviews is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and if we take a look at that it is this one just here I can see that yes this number is greater than all of the other one star reviews for the Harry Potter series so just remember sort by differs from sort because you're using a column to specify the sort as

opposed to just selecting ascending or descending much like the sort function we can also do a horizontal sort by and we're going To use this method to tidy up this small data set so if you take a look at this data notice that these column headings are particularly in the correct order for example we have the first name in column A and then we have the title in column B and their last name in column d ideally we want the title in column A the first name in column B and the last name in column

C I then don't really mind if I have department or salary in columns D or E Now in order to tidy up this data and sort it so that everything is in the correct order we need to assign a sort order to each of the columns and you can simply do this underneath your data set so what we're going to do here is simply Mark the order that we want the columns to appear in so I want the title column to be first so we're going to put a number one underneath there I then want

the first name so let's put Number two just there that's going to be followed by the last name so that's a number three we're then going to have the department which is going to be column number four and then finally the salary is going to be column number five and we can now use this sort order in our horizontal sort by so let's click somewhere up here and we're going to do sort by press the Tab Key what do I want to sort well I want to Sort everything in this table so I'm going to

select the entire data set A3 to e16 remember if you want to put this in a table that is absolutely fine comma what do I want to sort it by well I want to sort it by this array just here comma how do I want to sort it well I want to sort it in ascending order let's close the bracket hit enter and now you can see like magic we have all of our columns organized so now I can go in and add the titles back in so I'm Going to grab title let's Ctrl C

and just paste this across we want first name last name department and salary now notice here in the salary column we're probably going to want to apply some number formatting I'm also going to widen out these columns by selecting them all double clicking so that we can see everything in each of these cells the final thing to do is just select the salary column let's go up to number and we're going to give this some currency Formatting and we're going to take those decimal places down so very very simple to do a horizontal sort by

where you're specifying the order of the columns it's time now to move on and take a look at our next Dynamic array function and that is the sequence function now what sequence does in its most basic form is it outputs a list of sequential numbers and you can specify how many rows and how many columns and also what the step value is of those numbers Now before we get into a couple of practical examples of the use of sequence let's just take a look at it in its most basic simple form so if we type

in equals sequence let's take a look at the arguments so we have four arguments and three of them are optional now we are going to use all of them in this first example so what we want to specify first of all is how many rows of numbers do we want So let's say that we want four rows of numbers we can then specify how many columns of numbers we want so let's say four again I can then specify my starting number so for argument's sake let's start at number one and then I can provide the

step value so do we want it to step by one two three so on and so forth let's start out with one so you can understand how this works let's close off the function hit enter And take a look at what we've got so we have four rows and four Columns of numbers the numbers start at one and they increase or step by one each time now if we double click to edit this formula let's change some of these numbers so this time I'm going to say I want 10 rows we're going to have eight

columns the starting number is going to be 5 and we're going to step by 10 each time Let's now hit enter and see what we get so take a look at this we're stepping by 10 so 5 15 25 so on and so forth and we have 10 rows and eight columns so that's all well and good but how is this useful when we're working in Excel well let's take a look at a couple of practical examples so let's delete this out and move to cell D4 so what we have here is a list of

training courses in column A and maybe it's my New Year's resolution that I'm Going to complete a different training course every Friday starting on February the 11th 2022 so what I basically want to list out are all of the training dates so that is every Friday from this start date and then I can start assigning what courses I want to attend on those specific training dates so we can use sequence to help us with this so let's type in equal sequence how many rows of numbers do I want well the Number of rows is going

to be the number of training courses I have in this list now I don't particularly want to go through and count all of these particularly if my data set was a lot larger than it is so we're going to get count to do all the hard work for us now remember we need to use count a because we're counting text and not numbers so let's select all of the training courses A4 to a17 close off count a and now we're back Into our sequence formula we can now specify the number of columns that we want

now I'm just filling training dates down so I only want one column I can then choose my starting value well my start date is going to be February the 11th and because I have that in a Cell I can simply select this cell what is my step value going to be well I want to complete a different training course every Friday so that is effectively every seven days So my step value is going to be 7. if I was going to complete a training course every two weeks my step value would be 14. so let's

stick with seven close the bracket hit enter and now I get a whole bunch of dates now this column isn't formatted as a date column which is why we're getting these strange numbers so if we select them and just jump up to number formatting and apply the short date format you should see That the first date there is February the 11th but then the next one is February the 18th which is seven days after the start date so you can use sequence not only to produce some numbers but also to do things like create a

date schedule and there are so many other ways that you can use this sequence function what I can now do is go through and simply assign which courses I want to attend so maybe word is going to be my first Course I can just copy and paste that over we can also use sequence to unstack records and this is something that previous to this sequence command was actually quite difficult to do in Excel now what do we mean by unstacking records well again notice in column A we have some training courses listed out and I

have these listed vertically so we have the name of the training course first then we have the level we have the location of that training course Followed by the date and it just repeats round so again training course level location date so on and so forth and effectively because I don't really like the way that this is laid out I want to lay them out in this order so course level location and date and I want this to be dynamic so that when new training courses are added everything updates so in order to do that

we need to put our data into a table Ctrl t Yes my table has headers let's click on OK and I'm just going to turn off banded rows so let's click in cell C form and we're going to jump straight into our sequence function the first thing we need to specify are how many rows do we want well again I don't want to be counting down this list so I'm going to get count a to do all the hard work for me let's select everything in this column Let's close off count a and now we're

back into our sequence formula the next thing we need to specify are the number of columns well I have four columns that I need to populate course level location and date so we want four columns now for what we're trying to do here that is all we need we don't need a start or a step value so let's close off our formula and see what we get let's hit enter and we get a whole bunch of numbers Now each one of these numbers relates to an item in column A for example this number one relates

to the first thing that we have in this list so this is basically Excel number two is beginner number three is the location and number four is the date so effectively in this column we have all of the courses then we have all of the levels all of the locations and all of the dates now I don't have 24 courses because that Is how many cells I have highlighted just here and you can see that down in the status bar if you're not sure the count is 24. I only have six courses in column A

so what we need to do here is edit our formula and I'm just going to click at the end of the count a and we need to divide it by four so effectively we're dividing by the number of columns so divided by four hit enter and now we have six courses six levels six locations and six dates Now this still isn't given us exactly what we want we don't really want to see these numbers we want to see the name of the course the level the location and the date so we can use index to

find this out for us so we're going to type in equals index so what are we indexing what's our array well remember with index the array is always the information that you want to return so my array is going to be my List of training courses comma what is the row number well the sequence function has provided the row number for us so I'm going to select cell C4 now if I was to close my bracket just here and hit enter it's just going to return the first one Excel can you remember what symbol we

need to add to reference an entire Dynamic array well if you said the pound or the hash symbol you would be correct so let's Click at the end of C4 add a pound symbol notice it's selected the entire Dynamic array and now when I hit enter I get exactly what I'm looking for the only thing left to do here is change these dates we need to apply some short date formatting and we've now unstacked those records and they're looking a lot easier to read and of course if we change anything here so maybe this second

course changes to a PowerPoint intermediate course it's going to also Update in our results and if I add more data onto the bottom so I have some additional data down here let's just drag it up it becomes part of this table and our results also updates you can see we now have those additional items added onto the bottom and once again I just need to apply some short date formatting so you can use the sequence command in many different useful scenarios the filter function is another brand new Dynamic array in Excel 2021 that allows us

to filter our data based on criteria that we specify and we're going to be taking a look at the filter function over the next few lessons because there's lots of different ways that you can use this function so let's start out in this lesson by understanding simply what the filter function does and how it might be useful so on the left hand side I have a Reasonably large table and this table just shows a list of students it shows the exam that they took the grade that they achieved and also the date of their exam

and what I want to do here is create a few different filters so that I can get a list of the students that match that criteria so maybe I want to filter for all students that sat a specific exam so maybe the French exam maybe I want to see what exams occurred On a very specific date or maybe I want to see all of the students who failed the exam so I can send out letters inviting them to reset the test I can do all of this using the filter function now before we get into

the actual filter function we're going to do a couple of things to make our life easier the first thing we're going to do is you've probably guessed it we're going to put our data set into a table Ctrl t Yes my data has headers let's click on OK and let's immediately change that table style because it really is not very nice and I think I'm just going to choose no table Style I'm also going to give my table a name so we're going to call this exam results and hit enter now the next thing I'm

going to do just to make my life a lot easier is I'm going to create a data validation drop down list so I can easily select the exam from a list as Opposed to having to type it into cell F4 each time so we're going to utilize our unique function to get a unique list of all of the exams and then we're going to use that list in our data validation so let's click on a cell that's kind of out of the way we're going to say equals unique let's select our list of exams Ctrl

shift down arrow close off the unique function hit enter and now we have a unique list Now I don't want these to have the unique formula underneath so let's do Ctrl C and our little paste special trick let's paste the values directly over the top so now I have this list I'm going to create a data validation drop down so I can simply select them from a list so up to data we're going to go into Data validation we're going to create ourselves a drop down list and the source is going to be this range

just Here and click on OK so now that makes it a lot easier for me to switch between the different exams now I'm going to do exactly the same for the dates and also the grades the process is exactly the same so I'm going to do that off camera join me back here in a couple of seconds and we'll continue on with the filter function so now I have my three data validation drop down lists now one thing I did when I was creating a unique list of the Grades to get them to display a

b c d e and then fail I combined unique with sort so I'm going to get you to have a go at that we've seen how sort works and we've seen how unique works so see if you can get these to list out in exactly the same way that I have now I'm going to leave date and grade blank at the moment and just focus on the exam so I want to use the filter function to first of all show me all of the students That set the maths exam so we're going to type in

equals filter now filter has three arguments and the last one is optional now the array again the arrays the information that we want to return then we want to return student exam grade and date so we need to select all of our data Ctrl shift down arrow to select that entire range comma now this is where we specify our Criteria so what we want to include what is our filter well our filter is the exam column maths so what do we want to include well we want to include the exam column control shift down arrow

and that needs to equal whatever we have in cell F4 so at the moment that is maths comma all right the final argument which is the optional argument is if we want to specify some Text or something if it doesn't return any results so in general I tend to put in quotation marks no records if it can't find anything close the bracket hit enter and like magic we now have a list of all of the students who took the maths exam now once again column K doesn't have any formatting applied so let's change this to

short date format so now if I was to change this to French that list is also going to change So it makes it very simple for me to filter those results now currently we're just filtering by one piece of criteria and that is the exam that the student sat but it might be that we want to filter by two pieces of criteria so maybe the exam and the date or maybe three pieces of criteria at the exam the date and the grade it might be that we want to see a list of all of the

students that's at the science exam or achieved a grade of A and this is where we start to build in logic to our filter function that's exactly what we're going to explore over the next four lessons we're going to build in logic and I'm going to show you all of the different operators you can use to really refine your filter results but in its most basic form that is how the filter function works pretty straightforward now if you're wondering about these columns over here which have the data That we used to create our data validation

drop down if you want to hide those that's perfectly fine we can right click select hide and that just removes them from View in the previous lesson we saw how to use the filter function to filter for one piece of criteria and if you recall we use the filter function to filter for all students that set the maths exam now in this lesson we're going to move that concept on a little bit and we're Going to add in some logic to our filter and there are many different types of logic that you can add to

your filters and we're going to start out with the plus logic and all that means is that we're going to be using a plus operator now when we use the filter function with the plus operator we're basically doing an or formula so what does that exactly mean well it might be that I want to filter for all students that's at the maths Exam or achieved a grade of C or maybe I want to filter for all students that's at the French exam or set a test on a specific date so we use the plus operator

to separate our criteria and we're effectively applying or logic so let's see how that works now I'm just going to switch this filter back to Maths for this first example and we're going to type in equals filter now the array argument as we've already seen is What we want to return now we want to return the student the exam the grade and the date so our array is pretty much everything that we have in this table I'm going to highlight that first row and use my shortcut keys Ctrl shift down arrow to select everything now

we get to specify what to include now in the previous example when we were just filtering for students that sat the maths exam we simply selected the exam column and checked that it was equal to Maths but now we want to add two pieces of criteria because I'm going to filter for all of the students that set the maths exam or achieved a grade of C now when you have multiple pieces of criteria you need to encase each piece of criteria in Brackets so let's open a bracket and select what we want to include first

so I want to include all students that set the maths exam so we're going to select the exam range Ctrl shift down arrow And that has to equal whatever we have in cell F4 so that is the first piece of criteria let's close the bracket now if we want to do an or we then need to add the plus operator and then we can specify as second piece of criteria so I'm filtering for all students that set the maths exam or achieved a grade of C so my second piece of criteria is going to be

the grade range control shift down Arrow and that needs to equal what we have in cell F12 close the bracket now if I had more pieces of criteria that I wanted to add to my or logical formula I could carry on going I could add another plus and then specify my next piece of criteria now for this example we're just going to leave it at two pieces of criteria the only thing left to do here is finish off this filter formula now the last Argument here is an optional argument because it's in square brackets and

all we're specifying here is what we want it to return if it doesn't find any results so in quote marks we're just going to say no records and then we're going to close off the filter function let's hit enter now the first thing to note here is the column K doesn't have any formatting applied so let's click the drop down and change this to short Date format so now what we're getting here are all students that's at the maths exam or achieved a grade of C so we can see here for Ming Sia he set

the mass exam this girl sat the mass exam these two so on and so forth but we also have in here any students that achieved a grade C and of course if we have these as data validation drop down lists we can simply select different pieces of criteria so now I'm filtering for all the students that set The French exam or achieved a grade of D so that is how that plus operator Works you're essentially applying all logic to the filter function in the previous lesson we saw how we could use the filter function to

filter data based on logic and we use the plus operator to do an or logical filter so we were filtering for all students that set the maths exam or achieved a grade of C so now let's take a look at using the Asterix operator because Effectively when we use that we're doing an and logical formula so for example I might want to filter for all students that's at the French exam and achieved a grade of D and this works pretty much in exactly the same way we're just changing the operator so let's jump into cell

H4 and type in equals filter first thing we need to choose is the array so we want to return everything the student the exam the grade and the Date so we need to select all of the information in the table remember control shift down arrow to select everything comma what do we want to include well we're going to include two pieces of criteria again and each piece of criteria needs to go in Brackets so the first thing that we're filtering for are all students that sat the French exam so we need to select the exam

range control shift down arrow that needs to Equal whatever we have in cell F4 let's close the bracket now we want to apply our Asterix operator because we want to say and and then we can specify as second piece of criteria so as second piece of criteria is the grade so we want to select the grade range control shift down arrow and that needs to equal what we have in cell F12 we can then close the bracket now the final Thing to specify here is what we want it to display if it doesn't find any

records so again we're going to say no records and put that in quote marks we're going to close off our filter hit enter and take a look at that immediately I know that we have no students that sat the French exam and achieved a grade of D so what about if we start changing some of these things so let's go for grade e now I can see three students who sat the French exam who achieved the grade of E what about if I change the exam to maths we have one student who got an e

now remember if you want this table to dynamically update you need to make sure that your original data is in a table itself now currently my data isn't in a table how can I tell that well when I click inside the data if we take a look at the ribbons at the top I don't get my table contextual ribbons when you're clicked inside a table you Will see a table design ribbon at the top so let's press Ctrl T and put this data in a table yes my table has headers let's click on OK and

once again I'm going to change this to no specific format now if I was to go and add a name onto the end here my filter isn't going to update because I'm currently using a very specific cell range A4 to d41 so I would need to really redefine my Arguments for this particular formula so let's delete it out and I'm going to give my table a name so on the table design tab let's call this we'll just call it students now if we then do our filter again our array is the entire table and notice

now it's picked up the name of the table as opposed to the cell range then we specify what we want to include so let's open our bracket we're going to Select the exam range and that needs to equal what we have in cell F4 close the bracket we're doing an and so we want an asterisk in here and then we can specify our second piece of criteria so that is going to be the grade Ctrl shift down arrow and that needs to equal whatever we have in cell F 12. let's close off our criteria let's

specify what we want it to save it doesn't find any records and then close off our filter And if we hit enter we get the same result now the difference here is that if I go and add another student to the end of this table I should find that my filter formula updates so I'm going to add another student that sat the maths exam and achieved a grade of e currently we only have one result I would expect this to change as soon as we add somebody else so I'm just going to add my name

to the bottom here And maths we want a grade e and let's just say the 8th 2022 so if we scroll back up now you can see that that's automatically added that to my results so once again I hope you're taking note of the importance of putting your data into an Excel table if you want everything to dynamically update in this next example we're going to take a look at using the filter formula with the equals operator now equals is a little bit different as it will produce A result that contains either both criteria or

neither criteria so we're going to use a different example here now in the table on the left I have a small little table that I've named venues and we have a list of 10 or so different venues so this might be that we're looking to book a venue for an event or maybe a wedding reception or something like that we can then see the capacity of each venue in column B and if they provide a DJ in column C and what I want to do here is I want to use the filter function to get

a list of venues that have a capacity of greater than or equal to 400 and a DJ or they have a capacity of less than 400 and no DJ so let's take a look at how we would construct this so we're going to type in equals filter the first argument is our array so again this is what do we want to return now I want to return the venues the capacity And the DJ so I need to select all of the information and because I've named this table you can see the table name as opposed

to the cell references comma what do we want to include well we have two pieces of criteria so let's put the first one in Brackets and our first piece of criteria is that the capacity is greater than or equal to 400. so we want to select the capacity column and that needs to be greater than or equal To 400. let's close off our first piece of criteria now we need to use the equals operator and then enter as second piece of criteria so let's open a bracket the second piece of criteria is that we have

a DJ so we need to select the DJ column and this needs to equal yes and we need to put that in quote marks because it's text let's close off our bracket and specify What we want it to say if it returns no records so this time we're going to say no venues and close off our filter formula let's hit enter and see what we get so what I should be seeing here in my results are all of the venues that have a capacity of greater than or equal to 400 and a DJ so I

can see here Grand Ballroom that fits and these two here are both greater than 400 and they also have a DJ but what I'm also seeing in this list Are all of the venues that have a capacity of less than 400 and no DJ so that is basically these three just here so it might be that if we have a very large venue I want them to provide a DJ but if we have a smaller venue maybe it's in a small Pub or something like that we don't require a DJ so this is where that

equals operator comes in really useful and of course if we put this in a table if I add another venue onto the end Maybe I'm still scoping out different venues then our results are going to update so let's add the Magic Room onto the bottom and we're going to say that this has a capacity of 500 and yes it has a DJ and now you can see that because that meets our criteria of being over 400 and having a DJ it's adding it to my list of results so that is the equals operator it's basically

that both criteria are true or Neither criteria are true in the final example of using logic with the filter function we're going to take a look at the minus operator at the minus operator Works in a similar way but what we're going to do here is we're going to produce a list of venues that have a capacity of greater than or equal to 400 or a DJ but not both and as you would expect this works in a fairly similar way to all of the other operators that we've been looking at So we're going to

construct our filter function so let's type in equals filter our array as always is going to be everything that we want to return and because I have that in a table it's coming up with the table name and then we specify what we want to include now with this example I'm hard coding greater than or equal to 400 into the formula now that in general isn't the best way to put together your worksheets So maybe once I've put together the invite list I find that I have more guests than I was expecting if I want

to change this to greater than or equal to 500 or 600 it means I'm going to have to come in and change the formula where I've hard-coded that value so let's lay this out in a different way that kind of adheres more to the rules of good spreadsheet design so let's delete out filter and what I'm going to do over here is we're just Going to add a heading that says capacity and we're going to add into here 400. let's also add another column for the DJ and I'm going to put in here yes so

now instead of hard coding these values into the actual filter formula I can just reference the cell so if any of this information changes maybe I change my mind on the capacity or decide that I don't want a DJ I can simply change it in one cell and everything else is going To update that's a much better way of working with your spreadsheets so now let's construct our filter formula so equals filter our array is going to be what we want to return which is everything comma what do we want to include let's open a

bracket for our first piece of criteria so our first piece of criteria is that the capacity is greater than or equal to and now we Can choose our cell reference I4 let's close the bracket to close off our first piece of criteria now we're going to use the minus operator and then we're going to put in our second piece of criteria and that is that the DJ is equal to yes so we can select cell j4 let's close off the bracket let's specify what we want it to say if it finds no records so we're

going to say No venues close off our filter and hit enter and would you take a look at that so this one is a little bit harder to understand this minus operator what it's showing us are all of the venues that have a capacity of greater than or equal to 400 or a DJ but never both so this first one here Ritz is that has a capacity under 400 but it does have a DJ so it's appearing in our results the same for this one and the same for this One now when we get to

these three just here these venues have a capacity of greater than or equal to 400 but they don't have a DJ so one of these is true that's basically what will appear in the search results one of those conditions needs to be true but one thing that we don't see is when both conditions are true so what we won't see in here are any venues that have a capacity of greater than or equal to 400 and a DJ so that is the Difference with this operator and as I said if at any point uh details

change for example if I change the capacity to greater than 600 and hit enter you can see that automatically my results update and I haven't had to go in and start messing around with this filter formula if I change the DJ to no again I'm going to get a different set of results so outputting your criteria into separate cells and using the cell Reference is a much better method than hard coding it into the actual formula another new Dynamic array available in Excel 2021 is the Rand array function and Rand array allows us to generate

or randomize data so let's take a look at it in its basic form and then we're going to see how we can apply this in a real world scenario so I'm going to click just somewhere on this worksheet and we're going to type in Rand array Now notice here that we have five different arguments and all of them are optional but we're going to use all of these five arguments so you understand what each one does now as I said Rand array will generate a random list of numbers so the first thing we need to

do here is specify how many rows of numbers we want so I'm going to say that I want four rows of random numbers I can then choose how many columns so let's go for four Again and then if I want to I can specify a minimum and a maximum value now I don't have to utilize minimum maximum because none of these arguments are mandatory if I don't specify A Min or a Max then Excel is just going to generate some random numbers of its choosing but maybe I do want to be a little bit more

granular about the numbers that I'm generating so I'm going to say that I want to Generate numbers between five and let's say a thousand and the final argument is if I want those numbers to be decimals or integers so let's take a look at decimals first of all we're going to use the false argument let's close the bracket and hit enter and that is exactly what I get now of course if you want to you can take these decimal places down just by using your number formatting and there you have Your list of random numbers

and this is particularly good if you're just trying to generate some dummy data to use in maybe training videos like this one or maybe if you just want to practice your Excel skills it's good to know a few techniques just to get some random or dummy test data into your worksheet and of course because this is a Rand array formula you could throw away the underlying formula and just have the values in the cells by doing Ctrl C to Copy paste special and paste those values so really nice and straightforward let's take a look at

Rand array again but this time we're going to use the integer argument so let's choose render aim this time let's do 10 rows and we're going to do five columns the minimum value is going to be one and the maximum value is going to be 900. and this time we're going to use the True argument so that we get integers instead let's hit enter and there we go so that final argument really just specifies if you want decimal numbers or if you want integers so really nice and straightforward now that's all well and good but

how can this be useful in Practical examples well let's take a look at this first set of data now we're going to pretend that we work For a company called big drop bungee and we have the list of all of the people who are going to be doing a bungee jump today and we want to assign them to a jump order so who's going to go first because if we were to ask all of these people they're probably going to look towards everybody else to do the first bungee jump so we want to assign a

random order for these jumpers and we can use Rand array To help us do that so what we're going to do here is we're going to type in equals render a now how many rows do we want to Generate random numbers for well I want to Generate random numbers for all of these jumpers and because my list is fairly short it would be quite easy for me to count the number of jumpers but I'm going to get Excel to work this out for me by going straight into account a let's select our list of jumpers

Close off our count a and now we're back into our rant array formula now I don't actually want to specify a minimum or a maximum and I'm not going to specify the integer and if you don't specify what integer you want to use by default you're going to get a decimal which is fine in this case so let's close this off hit enter and this is what we get now notice that one of these looks slightly shorter than the other and that's just because there Is a zero on the end of this so just keep

things consistent I'm going to use my increase decimal button just to make that the same as all of the others so now that I have this list I'm going to use my copy and paste trick to throw away the underlying formula so let's select the numbers Ctrl C and then we're going to paste special and paste the values over the top so now we have these random decimal numbers I'm going to sort these into order So let's click in the jump order column and then on the data tab I'm going to sort these smallest to

largest so what we could say here is that whoever has the smallest number is going first and whoever has the largest number is going last so effectively we've generated a random jump order for all of these different jumpers so it looks like Lonnie has drawn the Short Straw and she's going to be doing her bungee jump first so that Is a very practical use of how you can use Rand array now before we move on from this lesson I want to show you one more function now technically this function isn't a dynamic array function but

it is very similar to Rand array so I thought it would be a good time to introduce it into the course because we are going to use this quite a bit later on now if we jump across to the next worksheet I want to show you how you can Use Rand between and I will say that Rand between is one of my most used functions in Excel because of the type of job that I do I'm always running training sessions and I need to be able to generate dummy exercise files and practice files with random

data and Rand between really helps you do this so let me show you an example of how it can be useful so let's just say that these people are employees and I want to generate a Worksheet that shows some random employees some random salaries and the dates that they were hired and I want to use this to maybe showcase sorting and filtering so instead of going through and just typing in a salary for each of these people very manually I want to use Ram between to generate some random numbers which I can use as salaries

so we're going to type in equals Rand between now round between just has two arguments Bottom and top so you just specify the bottom number and then the top number and the formula will Generate random numbers between those two numbers so let's say the bottom salary is going to be 25 000 and the top salary is going to be 50 000. close the bracket hit enter and now we can double click to copy that down let's control C and then paste just the Values over the top and now all I need to do is apply

some currency formatting and effectively I very quickly created myself some random salaries I can also utilize round between to Generate random dates so let's take a look at this now again we just have these two arguments but because we're using dates we want to go straight into the date formula so now we can specify our bottom date so let's see we're doing dates that people Have been hired so we're going to say that everybody was hired between 2005 and 2021. so the bottom date is going to be 2005 for the year and we'll say the

month is January and the day is the 1st of January let's close the bracket comma we now need to specify our top date so we go straight into the date formula again So my top date is we're not going to have hired anybody after December 31st 2021 so the year is 2021 the month is 12 and the day is 31. let's close off the date function close off Rand between and if we hit enter we're going to get a number let's double click to copy that down and we need to apply the correct date formatting

so let's jump up to here and select short date and like magic we've now generated ourselves some random Dates between 2005 and 2021 so ran between can be so helpful if you're quickly trying to create data sets to practice with or maybe do some training with another great addition to Dynamic array functions is the X lookup function and this is the perfect function for anybody who has ever struggled using index and merge to perform lookups the indexer match formula in itself is a reasonably complicated formula and it can be quite Difficult to remember particularly if

you don't use it all that often with the introduction of X lookup not only is it more powerful and more flexible the notation is a lot easier so let's take a look at a couple of examples of how we can use x lookup now in this table on the left hand side I have some apps listed out I have the category that the app belongs to the app name the type of app it is the revenue and the profit And effectively what I want to be able to do is Select an app from the data

validation drop down list and have it return the category the type the profit and the revenue now normally you would look at using vlookup or something like index and match for this and in fact in order to return the first result of the category you would have to use index and match because remember one of the big limitations of vlookup is that you can't use a lookup value that's to the right Of what you're trying to return so in this case Google Docs is to the right of the category so this would need to be

an indexer match now just so you get a good comparison as to how simple x lookup is Let's do an index match first of all so we're going to type in equals index and the first thing we need to select here is the array now the array is what you want to return so in this case we want to return the Category so we need to select the category column control shift down arrow to select that comma we now need to provide the row number and remember we can use the match function to help us

automate the finding of that row number and lookup value is whatever we have in cell H3 and our lookup array is wherever we're going to find that lookup value so that lookup value exists in the apps list Ctrl shift down arrow the final Argument that we have here is the match type and for this we want to do an exact match of the app name in the apps list so we want a zero argument on the end we're going to close off Match close off index and hit enter and that's going to give us our

result so let's just double check this we need to find Google Docs here it is in row nine and the category is productivity so that's all working and if you can remember this formula that's fine you Can still carry on using index and match but now let's take a look at how we can do the same thing but this time using X lookup because I think you're going to find this a lot easier so we're going to type in equals X lookup and press the Tab Key now the X lookup function has six arguments and

you'll notice that the last three are optional arguments because they're in square brackets so you don't necessarily have to use all of These arguments the first argument that we need to provide is the lookup value so that's fairly straightforward we're looking up whatever we have in cell H3 we then need to provide the lookup array so where are we going to find that app we're going to find it in the apps list Ctrl shift down arrow to select that column the only other thing we need to provide is the return array so what do we

want to return we want to return the category so we need to select the Category column control shift down arrow now if I wanted to I could just stop right there I don't have to go ahead with the final three arguments so if I close my bracket and hit enter it's going to give me the correct result so now let's do the same thing but for the type we're going to use some of the other arguments so let's type in equals x lookup our lookup value again is whatever we have in cell H3 and we're

looking it up In the apps list we then specify the return array so this time we want to return at the type so we need to select the type column comma now let's take a look at the first optional argument if not found so this is where you can specify what you want it to say if it can't match the app in the table now if it can't find it I just want it to say not found and we need to put this in quote marks the next optional Argument is match mode so this is

the type of match you want to do so much like the match function we can choose to do an exact match but we also have some other options here we can do an exact match or next smaller item we can do an exact match or next larger item or we can do a wild card character match so the Wild Card character match that would be relevant if I had for example maybe Google Asterix as my lookup value so we can do wild card Character matches and these other two where we're looking for an exact match

or next smaller or larger item I'm going to show an example of that in a moment it's very similar to when you do a vlookup approximate match now I want to do an exact match I want to match the words Google Docs exactly in the table so the next argument is a zero comma now I can choose how I want to search through this list so this is something else that you can't really do When you're performing a lookup with index a match I can choose to search first to last or last to first and

I can even do a binary search so if I have my items sorted in ascending or descending order I can specify that here too now if you don't provide any argument just here the default is searching first to last so it's going to start at the top of the table and search through the entries top to bottom so let's do first to last Close the bracket hit enter and now I get the type let's double check to make sure that that is correct I can see yes the type here for Google Docs is free ads

let's just finish these off let's do the profit so we're going to do X lookup again the lookup value is Google Docs comma the lookup array is where we're going to find that that's in the apps list the return array this time is The Profit column and I'm not going to use those optional arguments let's just close this off and hit enter and we get our result let's just do the final one because practice does indeed make perfect lookup value is H3 we're looking it up in the apps list and we want to return the

revenue this time so we want to select the revenue column close the bracket hit enter and we get our result let's just make sure that we Are still all correct and I can see that yes everything seems to be working so now if I change the app that we're looking up in the drop down everything should update nicely so X lookup is not only a lot easier in its notation it's a lot easier to understand remember it also allows you to specify a few different pieces of criteria let's take a look at another example of

X lookup because remember X lookup is part of the dynamic array set of functions which Means that it can spill and return multiple results so let's take a look at a quick example of that I have a small employee table just here we have some employee IDs some employee names and their department and what I want to be able to do is type in the employee ID and have it return the employee name and the department so we're effectively returning two pieces of information from this table so we're going to type in equals x lookup

Our lookup value is going to be the employee ID we're looking it up in the employee ID range and we want to return the employee name and the department so when it comes to the return array we simply just need to select everything that we want to return I'm going to add a piece of text if it's not found so we're going to say just not found in here I want to do an exact match and I want to search first to last Close the bracket hit enter and take a look at that if I

now change this employee ID to 1005 you can see that everything updates it looks like Terry is in the same Department let's choose something else one zero zero eight there we go now if I was to enter in an employee ID that doesn't exist so let's say 2000 I'm just going to get that if not found text in the cell so you can use x lookup to return multiple results because it is A dynamic array formula let's take a look at our last example and this is where we're going to focus on that match mode

argument and this is very similar to how vlookup works when you're doing an approximate match as opposed to an exact match so what we have over here are some tax rates and some salaries and what I want to be able to do is type in a salary and get it to return the tax rate now what if the salary that we have in Cell D6 doesn't exactly match a salary that we have in the table so maybe I have in here 30 000. now I want to apply some formatting to that so let's just apply

some accounting format and take those decimal places down and I want it to return the tax rate now because we don't have 30 000 listed exactly in this column I effectively need to do an approximate match so I Want it to return the tax rate that it's nearest to so I can choose if I want to return the next highest or the next smallest so let's type in equals X lookup our lookup value is the salary we're looking it up in the salary column we want to return the tax rate I'm going to skip over

the if not found option because we want to go straight to Match mode so this is where I can choose if I want to do an exact match or I match it to the next smallest item or the next largest item now I can't do an exact match here because 30 000 doesn't exist in the table so do I effectively want to round it down to the one below or round it up so I'm going to say I want to do an exact match or next larger item so that's going to be a one argument

Let's close the bracket hit enter and it's going to give me a tax rate of 25 percent so if we look at the table just here it's picked this one out because 30 000 if we were to round it up the next tax rate would be 25 percent if I was to change this to let's go for 14 000. it's given me a result of 12 because again it's rounding it up to 15 000 Effectively so that match mode is very similar to vlookup approximate match the final new Dynamic array formula that we're going to

look at in this section is x match and this is like match on steroids because we can do so much more with x-match than we can do with match so the best thing to do here is just dive in and take a look at a few different examples now I have three different examples here that we're going To run through and this first example we just have a very simple list of different applications and what I want to do is I want to search for the application and return its position in the list because that's

basically what the match function does it's going to provide you with the row number or wherever the lookup value is located and what you'll notice about the application that we're looking up is that I'm using a wild card character Just here so let's take a look at how we would construct this x match so we're going to type in equals let's choose xmatch and we have five different arguments here once again the last two are optionals so we don't need to complete those if we don't want to now the first argument is the lookup value

so we're looking up whatever we have in cell C5 where are we going to look it up well we're going to look it up in this list just here what Type of match do we want to do are we doing an exact match of the word g-o-o Asterix do we want to match exactly or to the next smaller item or to the next larger item well it's going to be none of those because we're using a wild card character so for this one we're going to choose number two and then finally we get to specify

the search mode so if we want to search first to last last first or if we've sorted our list in ascending or Descending order so I want to search First to Last so we're going to add a 1 onto the end there close the bracket hit enter and I can see here that using this wildcard character it's picked out of this list that I'm looking for Google Docs and it's returned position of one so xmatch shares many similarities with the X lookup function let's take a look at another example now this time we just have

a very small list of employees and We have the monetary value of the sales that they've generated and what we're going to see here is that any of these sales agents that have generated more than 17 000 in sales are going to get a bonus and what the x match formula will do is it will basically do a count because we're using numeric values and it's going to tell us how many employees in our list will receive a bonus so let's type in equals x match our Lookup value is going to be our threshold where

are we looking this up well we're looking it up in the sales column now what type of match do we want to do here well I don't want to do an exact match because we're not matching exactly 17 000 in that column what I want to say is that everybody who's achieved greater than that amount of sales is going to get a bonus so I want to do an exact match or next larger item so we want a one in there And we're going to search First to Last let's close the bracket and hit enter

and it's telling me that two employees have exceeded 17 000 in sales and are going to get a bonus if I check the table over here I can see yes it's only these two people Adam Lacy and Lucy Jones who will receive a bonus now the third example here is an example of how you can use index with x match so you're probably more familiar with using index with the match function but You can expand on that by using x match so let's return the department and the location for the employee that we have in

cell G29 so we're going to start out with an index we need to choose our array so remember our array is is the information that we want to return so in this case that's going to be the department Comma next we need to find the row number now normally if we were doing just a regular index and match this is where we would go straight into a match formula and we're going to do exactly the same thing here but we're just going to use x match instead we can now specify our lookup value and our

lookup value is the employee we're looking up the employee name in the employee name range and now we can choose match mode and Search mode so I want to do an exact match of the employee name and I want to search through the list first to last so we want a one on the end let's close off x-match close off index and hit enter let's do that one more time for the location so we're going to type in equals index this time we want to return the location so this is our array We want to

automate the finding of the row number by going straight into xmatch our lookup value is the employee we want to look that up in the employee range we want to do an exact match and we're searching first to last so we have a few more additional pieces of information that we can add into our formula when we're using xmatch as opposed to match let's close off both of our formulas hit enter and let's double Check our results so Adam Lacy he's in the marketing department and he's located in the west block if I was to

change this to let's say Ming Sia and hit enter all of those details update so x match is pretty much the same as match it will return the position of a lookup value and you can combine it with index to perform a powerful and complex lookup it's time now to complete exercise 2. and in this exercise I'd like you to Practice some of the skills that you've learned in this section related to Dynamic array functions now notice at the bottom we have four different worksheets that I want you to work through we're going to start

out on the first worksheet where we're going to practice using the unique function so the first thing I'd like you to do is extract a list of unique months into column G I'd then like you to extract a list of Distinct months into column h and then finally I'd like you to count the number of unique months once you've done that you can click over to the filter and sort worksheet now for this exercise I'd like you to First create a data validation drop down list containing unique values for the sales agent and unique values

for the month and what I'd then like you to do is use the filter function and create a filter that filters for the sales agent Ben and I'd like you to ensure that the text no records is displayed for zero results once you've done that and it's working I'd like you to then modify the formula to filter for sales agent Ben and the month of February and once you have those results I'd then like you to modify the formula again to filter for sales agent Ben or the month of February which should give you a

longer list once you have that longer list of results I'd then like you to modify the formula and Sort the results in ascending order by sales agent and I'd like you to use the sort function as opposed to sorting utilities on the home or data ribbons and then a final thing I'd like you to do is enter the total profit generated by Claire for the month of March and I'd like you just to input that into cell P4 once you've completed that it's time to move on to the X lookup worksheet now for this exercise

once again I'd like you to create a data validation drop Down list in cell I4 containing the unique values for the sales agents and then I'd like you to construct an X lookup formula to return the team the revenue and the profit for whichever sales agent is selected in cell I4 and then the final part of this exercise is practicing the rant array function so I'd like you to use Rand array to add some dummy data into columns B and C for revenue and profit and I'd like you to use the count a Function to

work out the number of rows required I'd like you to use a hundred as the minimum value and a thousand as the maximum value and output the values as integers not decimals once you've done that I'd like you to use paste values to just throw away the underlying formulas so quite a bit of work to do in this exercise have a go at it and if you'd like to see my answer then please keep Watching so the first thing we need to do here is extract a list of unique months into column G so this

is fairly straightforward we're just going to select the unique function our array is going to be the list of months and that is it close the bracket hit enter and that is our unique list now remember distinct is slightly different because that will return only the months that appear exactly once so we're going to go for Unique again we still want to extract the months we want to return the unique rows so we need a false in here but we want to return items that appear exactly once so we're going to add a true on

the end here and hit enter and then finally I asked you to count the number of unique months so because we're counting text we need to use count a we can then go into unique and we can select our months close off Unique close off count a hit enter and the result there is seven which should basically be the same as the number of values returned in column G and if we take a look down the status bar you can see that the count is in fact seven let's jump across to the next worksheet now

this is where we get to practice the filter and the sort functions and the first thing I asked you to do was to create a data validation drop down list containing unique values for the sales Agent and months so the first thing I'm going to do is just somewhere down here is I'm going to use unique again to get a unique list of the sales agents and also a unique list of the months [Music] so now I can use these to create my data validation drop downs so in cell G5 let's jump up to data

into Data validation we want to create a list and our source is going to be these values just here we Need to do exactly the same for the month so up to date a validation we want to create a list and our source are our unique months so let's make a couple of selections the next thing I asked you to do was to create a filter to filter the sales agent Ben and ensure that the text no records is displayed if there are no results so we want to come over here and put together our

first filter Now we want to return everything so our array is going to be everything in this table we now need to specify what we want to include now we're only including sales agent Ben so we only have one piece of criteria so we're going to include the sales agent when it's equal to what we have in cell G5 and in a moment I'm going to switch this to say Ben comma what do we want it to say if it Doesn't find any records well we want it to say no records let's close our filter

and hit enter at the moment we're seeing the results for Claire but we need to switch this to Ben and there we go this time we want to modify the formula to filter for sales agent Ben and the month of February so let's switch our month to February and let's edit our formula I'm going to edit this up in the formula bar so if we delete out what we have there And just take it back we've selected our range now we need to specify what we want to include now remember if you have more than

one piece of criteria they need to go in Brackets so our first piece of criteria is that the sales agent needs to equal Ben let's close the bracket and if we're doing an and filter we need to add the multiplication symbol because our second Piece of criteria is that the month is equal to February let's close the bracket we want it to say no records if it doesn't find anything let's close and hit enter and now we get two results the sales agent Ben in the month of February next I wanted you to modify the

formula to filter for sales agent Ben or February so this is where we're changing that operator so let's go back up to our formula and Instead of an Asterix in here we just need to switch this out for a plus instead so now we're getting a slightly longer list of results because we're filtering for sales agent Ben or the month of February then I asked you to modify the formula and sort the results in ascending order by sales agent so once again let's jump up to the formula bar and we're just going to add salt

onto the front The array is generated by the filter formula let's go to the end our sort index well we want to sort by the sales agent which is column number one and we want to sort in ascending order so we need another one on here let's close the bracket hit enter and we get our new list of sorted results the final thing I asked you to do was to enter the total profit generated by Claire for the month of March in cell P4 So let's switch our filter to Claire and we're going to change

our formula so this time we're going to say filter we want to select everything we have two pieces of criteria the first piece is that we want to filter for sales agent Claire so sales agent must equal Claire and so we need an asterisk in there we want to filter for the month of March so let's select Month that needs to recall what we have in cell G8 and again I'm going to change this to march in a moment let's close the bracket let's add our text for no records close the bracket again and hit

enter now let's make sure that we switch this to March because the final thing we needed to do was enter the total profit for Claire in cell P4 so this is a very straightforward sum calculation let's Just type it in we're looking for the total profit so let's select both of those cells hit enter and there we go five five five let's move on to the next part of this exercise the first thing we need to do here is create a data validation drop down list containing unique values for the sales agents now all of

these sales agents are unique which makes this a little bit simpler we can go up to data validation we don't need to do unique First of all we're going to create a list and our source is going to be this range just here let's click on OK and I'm just going to select a sales agent from here because now we want to use an X lookup formula to return the team the revenue and the profit so let's type in x look up a lookup value is whatever we have in cell I four our lookup array

well our lookup array is the sales agent range And our return array is going to be the team close the bracket hit enter and that gives us our result we're going to do exactly the same to look up the revenue and the profit so our lookup value is I4 we're looking it up in the sales agent column and this time we're returning the revenue close the bracket hit enter and finally we need to do the same for The profit lookup value is I4 we're looking that up in the sales agent range and this time we're

returning the profit close the bracket hit enter and there we go and we should find that when we select somebody else from this list everything updates the final part of this exercise was to practice using the Rand array function to add some dummy data into columns B And C so let's click in cell B5 and type in Rand array now the first argument here is how many rows of numbers do we want well I want the number of rows to be equal to the number of sales agents so I'm going to use the count a

function to work out how many rows I have how many columns of numbers do I want well I want to fill revenue and profit which is two columns I want the minimum value to be 100 the maximum value To be a thousand and I want to show these as integers as opposed to decimals so we need a true argument on the end let's close the bracket hit enter and like magic I get my dummy data the final part of this exercise was just to throw away the underlying round array formula so that these are just

values so let's select them all Ctrl C to copy let's go to the Home tab and we can just paste special paste values and that is it so quite a long exercise for this Section I hope you got on okay with that and I will see you in the next exercise in this section of the course we're going to take a look at some more advanced lookup and reference functions and we're going to start out in this lesson by taking a look at how we can perform two-way lookups and I'm going to show you two

different methods we're going to use index and match first of all and then I'm going to show you how you could do the same thing but using The new xlookup function now what exactly do we mean by a two-way lookup well effectively what we want to do is we want to look up information using two pieces of criteria as opposed to one if we take a look at the table that we have on the worksheet this basically just lists out a few different travel companies we then have the months January to December listed across the

top and then in the middle here the main bulk of our data is some sales figures That each of these companies have generated by month and what I'm aiming to do is I want to be able to select a month and a company and have it returned the sales figure so we're doing a two-way lookup because we need to use two lookup values we need to look up the month and then we need to look up the company to get our result now before we get into constructing the formulas there's some prep work that we

need to do here and all of this prep Work is really just to make your life a lot simpler and easier now the first thing I'm going to do is put my data into a good old Excel table control t yes my table has headers let's click on OK and immediately I'm going to change that to no particular format let's give this table a name so let's call this travel underscore data now one thing I don't really need here are these filter buttons in the column heading so if we Go up to table design we

can simply deselect filter button to get rid of those now the next thing I want to do is I want to create two data validation drop down lists so I can simply select the month and the company I don't really want to spend time typing each one in to get my result now what I found in the past is that if I create a data validation drop down list and I use this range running horizontally across the page it doesn't tend to work So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to Output January

to December and I'm going to flip them around so we have them in a vertical list and then I'm going to use that list for my data validation now a quick way of just flipping around data is to use the transpose function now this is something you may have used in paste special previously but there is also a function to do the same thing and all we need to do is Select our Range press enter and it's going to give us a vertical output now I want to throw away the underlying formulas so Ctrl C

and then we're going to paste special and paste the values so now that I have this list I'm going to create a data validation drop down so up to data into Data validation we want to create a list and our source Is going to be this over here and click on OK so now I have all of those values listed in a drop down we're going to do the same for the companies now I have these in a vertical list already so this is straightforward data validation we're going to create a list and our source

is just going to be these values here and click on ok now the final step of preparing this data that I'm going to do is I'm going to create some named ranges to make our formula a lot simpler to understand so I'm going to create a named range for the company's range for the months and also for the data so let's start out with the months I'm going to select all of those cells and then in the name box we're just going to call this months let's select the companies We're going to call this companies

and then let's select our data set and we're just going to call this data so now let's go in and let's build our first two-way lookup and the first method I'm going to use is index and match so let's type in equals index the first thing we need to choose is our array now remember the array is where we're going to find our answer so our answer is going to be somewhere Within These numbers now instead of selecting the cell range because I've named my ranges I can simply press the F3 key and that's going

to show me all of the ranges that I have in my workbook so I can choose the data range we need to automate the finding of the row number using match what is our lookup value well we have two different lookup values we need to look up the month but we also need to look up the company so let's deal with the month first of All my lookup value is going to be B13 where am I going to look that up well I want to look it up in this month range at the top now

again because we named that range we can simply press the F3 key and select the months range comma we want to do an exact match of that month name in that range so we want a zero on the end there let's close off our first match now because this is a two-way lookup we need to go straight into another match And this time we're going to look up the company so our lookup value is A14 where are we looking it up well if we press F3 we're looking it up in the company's range and we're

doing an exact match let's close off our match close off our index and then when we hit enter we should find we get the correct result so let's double check we're looking at May sun and sales which is this value just here and I can see that yes that is The same let's select something else let's go for January and go explore there we go that's exactly right so a few steps there to achieve a really nice two-way lookup now that is the method using index and match but of course we can do exactly the

same thing using the new xlookup function so let me show you how this works let's delete it out we're going to type in equals X lookup so what is our lookup value again we have two different lookup values let's deal with the months first of all we're looking up January where are we looking it up well we can press that F3 key we want to look it up in the months comma the next argument is the return array now when we're using X lookup we specify the return array last so we want to go straight

into our next X lookup our lookup value is the company and we're looking that up in the Company's range F3 companies comma now we can specify what our return array is so our return array is going to be those numbers F3 let's select the data and I could carry on going so if I want to specify a value if it's not found at match mode or search mode I can definitely do that so let's do that I'm going to add in not found if it can't find what I'm looking for the match mode is going

to be exact And we're going to search first to last let's close off both of our X lookups and hit enter and now take a look at what we get that looks good so far if we switch to April and let's say footsteps I'm getting the correct value the choose function in Excel returns a value from a list using its given position or index and choose can be used useful in many different scenarios and its power increases when it's combined With other functions so let's take a look at choose in its most basic form first

of all so what I could do here if I just click in a random cell somewhere on the work Sheen if we type in equals choose notice we have three arguments just here now there are actually more than three arguments again because we have those three dots at the end now the first argument is the index number now I'm going to type in a 2 here This won't make too much sense to you at the moment but just bear with me because it will all become clear comma value number one now I'm going to enter

in three values we're just going to use colors so let's go for red as our value one we're going to say blue is our value 2 and green is our value three now if I press enter what result do you think I'm going to get here it's going to return blue and that's because it's using this index number Here the number two to pick the second item that I have listed out if I was to change this index number to 1 I'm going to get red and as you would expect if I change this to

3 I'm going to get green I could even do this using cell references instead so if I have red blue and green listed out in cells I could say equals choose index number let's say three this time and instead of typing the values out I can use the cell references so we have Value one I'm going to lock that cell reference value 2. and finally value 3. close the bracket hit enter and because we're selecting the third item it's returning the word green so choose can help you choose and value based on an index or

a position number now that's all well and good but how can this be useful well let's take a look at a couple of examples now if we take a look at this first Table we just have some employee names and we have a code next to them and we need to complete the department for each of these employees then over on the right hand side we have the code and then we have the department that that code relates to effectively what I want to do is I want it to look at the code I want

it to match it over here and return the corresponding Department now we could use a vlookup to do this so Let's do that first of all and then I'll show you why there is an advantage to using choose instead so I could do equals vlookup the lookup value is going to be the code the table array is this over here F4 to G7 and we need to make sure that we lock that the column index number so what do we want to return we want to return the department which is column number two and we're

going to do an exact match Which is a false argument hit enter and then I can copy that formula down and that's going to give me the correct result everything corresponds to this little table however what happens to this formula if I was to delete this table over here well if I delete it out I suddenly Get N A errors because this vlookup doesn't have anything to refer to so this is where choose has an advantage because we're actually specifying all of Our arguments within one function when we're not referring to an external table or

external data so let's undo and we're going to do this again but this time we're going to use choose so let's type in equals choose our index number is going to be the code and then we can specify our values so I could type directly into here sales then we have HR than marketing and then finally we have Finance Let's close the bracket hit enter and then when I copy this down it's giving me exactly the same results as the vlookup but if I was to delete this data over here it's not going to affect

the choose formula because we're referring to the different departments directly within the formula now of course if we were to use cell references in the choose formula for sales HR marketing and finance instead of actually typing out the words we're going to have the Same situation as we do with the vlookup because the formula would be referring to cells over here if we were to delete this data then that's going to give us some errors in our formulas but we can use choose in a similar way to vlookup and then it doesn't matter if we

delete the data or not now another way that you can use choose and this is something again that I do frequently and this is particularly useful if you want to create some data that you can just use For training or practicing Excel so what I'm going to do is I'm going to grab these departments Ctrl C let's just paste those I'm going to paste them all the way over here because this formula can get quite long now I'm going to add a few more departments onto the end here so let's say projects development and it

now it might be that for this list of employees I want to assign a random Department to them I can use a combination of choose and Rand between to do that so we can type in equals let's go for choose and this time we're going to go straight into Rand between now remember with this formula we need to define a bottom and a top number and round between will Generate random numbers between those two numbers so my bottom number is going to be one and my top number is basically going to Be the count of

the number of different departments that I have now I only have a short list I could type in seven or I can get Excel to do the hard work for me by using account a selecting the range and we need to lock that range if we're going to copy this formula down so we can close off our count a close off our round between and now we're back into our choose formula so now I can specify my different values so my first value is Cell j23 let's lock that the next one is HR then we

have marketing next is finance projects development and finally we have it let's close off add choose formula if we hit enter we can then copy this down and we're basically getting this list of departments put in a random order and the way that this function works is render between is basically Assigning a number between 1 and 7 randomly to each of these names and then that number is being used to reference one of these departments one to seven and of course if you want to throw away the underlying formulas you can control C and paste

values over the top so this is something I use all the time when I'm generating random data sets for practice purposes now let's look at our final example of using choose now here I have a list of dates and what I basically want to do is I want Excel to look at the date in column A and I want it to tell me what quarter this date falls into now there are a couple of different ways that you could do this we could do this using the round up function so if we type in round

up we're then going to go straight into the month function let's select the month and then we want to divide it by three which is going to give us the quarters The final thing to specify is the number of digits now I don't want any digits on the end so let's close the bracket hit enter and then if I copy this formula down it's going to tell me that these ones are all part of quarter one these ones are Quarter Two these are quarter three so on and so forth now another way that you could

do this is by using choose so let's type in equals choose then we want to go straight into the month function again and our serial Number is going to be the date now we can specify our values so the way that this works is that the first quarter is made up of three months so January February March the second quarter is made up of April May June someone and so forth throughout the year so we're going to assign a value to each of the months so January is one so is February so is March we

then have April May June July August September October November December so we're assigning a value to each of those months hit enter and we should find that we get exactly the same thing now some people find this choose formula easier to remember than this Roundup formula and I will leave that down to you to determine which one you want to use but I just wanted to Showcase there a few examples of how you can use choose In real life scenarios the switch function is very similar to the choose function and can be a good replacement

for something like vlookup or X lookup so in this lesson we're going to take a look at an example of how you can use switch now what we have here in column D are some movies listed out in column e we have a ratings column which is currently blank and then in column F we have the IMDb score for that movie and what I Effectively want to do here is complete the ratings column using the IMDb score and if we take a look over on the left hand side we have a little table here that

shows the rating and the score that's attributed to that rating now of course this is a scenario that is kind of perfect for some kind of lookup function like vlookup or X lookup and it's worth noting that the switch function despite the fact that it is really a lookup function you're not Going to find it under the lookup and reference group of functions in the functions Library you'll actually find switch underneath logical now before we get on to working with switch let's take a look at how we would do this if we were using X

lookup and then we can do a good comparison between the two so we're going to type in xlookup now the lookup value is going to be the IMDb score comma where are we looking this up what is our lookup array well our lookup array is going to be wherever we're going to find this score so this is our lookup array B3 to B7 now we're going to copy this formula down so we don't want those cells moving so F4 to lock what is our return array well we want to return the rating so we need

to select A3 to A7 F4 to lock and then we close Off our X lookup let's hit enter let's copy this down and we get exactly what we're looking for now of course the disadvantage with this again is if we were to delete this table or delete the values out we're going to get n a errors in column e so one advantage that the switch function and the choose function also have is that we don't necessarily have to have what we're looking up in a table or a list Because we Define our values from within

the formula so let's do the same thing but this time we're going to use switch so Ctrl shift down just delete out everything that we have in there and this time we're going to use switch our first argument is the expression so this is basically what are you looking up so I want to look up the score comma Now I get to define the different Values so the first value I need to Define is a score of 9. if it finds a score of 9 it's going to return the word excellent if it finds a

score of 8 it's going to return the words very good seven is going to be good six is okay and finally five is poor And close the bracket so now if I hit enter and copy this formula down it's going to produce exactly the same result as the X lookup the only difference here is that if this data gets deleted out of this table it has absolutely no effect on the values in column e because we're defining our values that we're using as opposed to referring to them via cell references in an external table or

some kind of list Elsewhere on The worksheet so that is the advantage that switch and to a lesser extent choose have over X lookup and vlookup so you might find there are certain scenarios where switch is going to be extremely useful to you particularly if you don't want big long lists of data or tables of data on your worksheet you just want the results it's time now to do exercise three and in this exercise we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in This section so the first thing I'd like you to

do in this exercise is practice two-way extra cups so I'd like you to replace the words month in cell K4 and team in cell A3 with data validation drop down lists that contain the months and also the teams I then like you in cell L4 to add a two-way X lookup formula to look up the month and the team and return the sales total and then I'd like you to test this formula is working by checking that your Results are correct by finding them in the table once you've done that it's time to move on

to the next part of this exercise and in this exercise we're going to practice using choose and Rand between so I have a list of team members just here and what I want to do is assign them to a team based on colors and I want the color assignment to be random for each of the team members so I'd like you to combine the choose and the Rand between functions to assign Team members randomly to a team based on the colors that we have listed just here and then in the final part of this exercise

I'd like you to practice using the switch function so I'd like you to use the switch function to search in this table up here for the job ratings for each employees but instead of the job rating I'd like you to return the grade that's attributed to each of the job ratings and I'd like you to use the switch Function here as opposed to the probably slightly easier option of using a lookup function so quite a few things to do there if you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching so in the first part

of this exercise I asked you to replace the words month and team with data validation drop-down lists so let's get rid of the word month and do our first drop down so into Data validation we're going to choose list and we need a List of the months so our source is going to be A4 to a 15. that looks perfect we're going to do exactly the same for team let's go into Data validation we want to create a list but this time our source are the teams just here let's click the drop down looking good

now that we have these two drop downs I want to create a two-way X lookup Formula that's going to find the value in this table based on my Selections in the drop down lists so we're going to type in equals X lookup so our first lookup value is going to be the month comma where are we looking it up well we're looking it up in the month array comma now we need to go into our second X lookup this time we're looking up the team We're looking this up in the team array what do we

want to return well our result could be anywhere in our table so we need to select all of the values let's close off the first X lookup close off the second and hit enter and now we get our result let's just apply a little bit of accounting format and take those decimal places down and let's check that our result is correct so if we take a look at March Team Four This is the answer three two five four and that's exactly what we have if we change the month to let's go for January and we'll

say team two let's check that in the table that should be our result which it is so once you've completed that part of the exercise let's move on to the choose worksheet now for this I asked you to use the choose and RAM between functions to assign team members randomly to a team based on color so in here what we want To do is we want to type in equals choose and then we want to generate some random numbers so we're going to go straight into Rand between now the random numbers that we want to

generate are going to correspond to these colors in the list so what is the bottom random number that we want to generate well it's going to be number one what is the top well I have four items so the top number is going to be four Now I'm back into my choose function and I can assign meaning to the random numbers that I'm generating by assigning them to Colors so whenever we get a number one generated it's going to Output red and we're going to lock this because we want to copy it down whenever there's

number two we're going to get the next color whenever there's a number three we're going to get green and whenever there's number four we're going to get white Let's close off choose hit enter and now if we double click to copy this down we have a bunch of random colors generated for each team member the final part of this exercise was to use the switch function to search in the table for the job rating and return the corresponding grade so we have the job ratings up here and we have exactly what those job ratings mean

so excellent very good okay or poor and in the table below I have a list of employees the job rating that They've achieved but I want to return the grade now of course we could do this using some kind of Lookout function but I wanted you to use the switch function so let's type in equals switch our expression so what are we evaluating here we're evaluating the value in cell B12 what is our value well if the value in cell B12 is 1 then we want it to Output the word excellent If the value is

2 we want the word very good if the value is 3 then we want it to say okay if the value is 4 we want it to say poor close off the bracket let's hit enter that looks good so far double click to copy down and there we have our results remember the main advantage of doing it this way over lookups is that I could now freely delete out this table at the top and it's not going to affect my Formula so that's the end of this exercise I hope you gotten okay with that I

will see you in the next one in this lesson we're going to take a look at how we can use median and mode and both median and mode are statistical functions and if you're looking for them on the formulas ribbon you're not going to see statistical functions listed out here you're going to need to click on more functions and you'll find a group called statistical and both of them are In here if we scroll down to the m section we have median and we have mode now one thing to note here is that we have

two mode functions mode Dot mult and mode dot single in previous versions of excel I'm talking pretty old versions of excel sort of pre-2010 we only had a mode function a mode definitely had its limitations which meant that Microsoft implemented two new functions mode Dot mult and mode dot single I'm going to take a look at both of these so you Understand the difference now the first thing we're going to do is we're going to find the average I'm going to use this little table over here which basically registers the steps per day of a

particular person so in general they do between 5000 and 6 000 steps per day over roughly a month and a half so if I want to find what the average number of steps per day for this person were and remember an average is also known as the mean we can simply use a Average function we should all be very familiar with this we can simply select our data A3 to E12 close off the bracket and we can see that the average number of steps per day is 5617. now the median is similar to average but

it finds the middle value in the list and a lot of the time you'll find that the medium value is different to the average value remember with an average Excel we'll basically add up all the numbers and divide it by the number Of values to get the average whereas median will effectively sort all the numbers into order and find the middle value so let's take a look at the median for this data set so we're going to click in cell H3 type in equals median and we're just going to select our data Range close the

bracket hit enter and we have a completely different Number now this number is also affected by whether you have an odd number of values or an even number of values if you have an odd number of values then Excel will take the middle value whereas if you have an even number of values it will take the two middle values and average them to get the median so that's how it calculates this number now let's move on to mode now if we type in equals mode notice that we have three functions In this list mode multi

mode single and then we have mode and what you'll notice about mode is that we have this little warning triangle next to it and that basically means that this is the compatibility version of mode so this is a Formula that's available in older versions of excel so Excel 2010 or previous mode has since been replaced in later versions of excel with the two functions that you can see above and Both of these do slightly different things it is worth noting though that if you do use the two new functions in your spreadsheet and you send

this spreadsheet to somebody using a very old version of excel they might not be able to see these calculations because these two functions won't be available to them in their version now hopefully that won't be too much of a problem there aren't that many people these days who Are still using Excel 2010 or Excel 2007 but it's definitely something to be aware of so let's take a look at mode single first of all now mode single works pretty much the same as the old mode function and what mode singer will do is it will look

through our data and it will produce a result or it will tell us which one of these values occurs most frequently so I have quite a few values in this data set that repeat so I want to find Out which one occurs most often so we're just going to select our data set one more time let's close the bracket and hit enter and I can see that 5713 occurs the most now I'm just going to check that by applying some conditional formatting and I'm just going to highlight the cells that match 5713 and I can

see that I have four occurrences of this value now there are other numbers that occur multiple times in this data set and if I highlight all Of the duplicates you can see all of the numbers which occur more than once and this is pretty much what mode multiple does it will find the value that occurs the most so in this case it's going to be 5713 we know that this occurs four times but mode multiple will also show us all of the other values that also occur four times and this is something that the old

mode function in earlier versions of excel couldn't handle hence why we now have two new formulas So if we do mode dot multi and select our cell range let's close the bracket and hit enter notice that these results work like a dynamic array they spill down into the other cells now I'm going to take the decimal places down all the way on these numbers and I can now see that these three values occur four times in my data set so you use mode multiple if you want to extract multiple results Most of us are used

to using Min and Max to find the largest and the smallest values in a range of data but we also have a couple of functions called large and small which will help us find not the largest and the smallest values but the second third fourth fifth largest and smallest values in a range of data so let's take a look at how this works now the data that we're using here are just some album sales we can see the year that the album was released the Artist the album name the genre that that album belongs to

and then we have the sales of that album so in this first table I want to find out what the top five sales totals were so if I want to find out the top one this is fairly straightforward we can simply use max let's select our sales range close our bracket hit enter and I can see that the top selling album sold four and a half million copies But what if I want to find the second third fourth and fifth best-selling albums by sales total well this is where I would use the large function now

if we type in equals large notice that we have two arguments array and then we have k now array is basically going to be what we want to return which is going to be one of these sales values and K is where we specify whether we want to return the second largest the Third largest the fourth so on and so forth so if I want to return the second largest value I can simply type A 2 in there if I close my bracket and hit enter it's going to tell me that the second best-selling album

sold three million 300 000 copies and actually looking at this these shouldn't really be monetary values this is the number of copies so let's change that to number and take Those decimal places down and we'll also modify our formatting just here as well we need to take that to number and take those down and let's add a comma separator perfect now if I want to copy this formula down like that it's not really going to work because for each formula it's attempting to pull back the second largest and also because we didn't lock the table

range those cell references are moving down Each time so these three values that it's returning is not correct so this is where using a cell reference for that K value can really help so if we do large again and let's select our array and I'm going to lock it this time by pressing F4 and for our value because we want to return the third largest I'm going to use the cell reference that contains three let's close the bracket and hit enter And now I should be able to drag this value down and I'm going to

get the correct results similarly we can use the small function to tell us what the second lowest third lowest fourth lowest values are now if I want to find the lowest I could use min so we're going to select our Range close the bracket hit enter and there we get our Min now once again I'm just going to change these to Numbers now if I want to find the second lowest I can use small we can select our array this is exactly the same as using large press F4 to lock and then I'm going to

use the cell reference G5 as that K value close the bracket hit enter and now I can copy these down so really nice and straightforward now what if I want to move this on a little bit and maybe find the highest sales in the pop genre now if I want to Find the absolute highest I could use the max ifs function for this so let's type in Max ifs my max range well I want to return the sales again so E4 to e32 and we're going to press F4 to lock that and now we need

to specify our criteria and our criteria range well we only want to look for sales for albums in the pop genre so our criteria range is going to be the genre and we need to lock that And our criteria is going to be pop now I don't have that written out in a Cell so I'm just going to type it in quote marks into the formula let's hit enter and that is the result that I'm getting so let's apply the same formatting and if I take a quick look four thousand five hundred well I can

see that sitting just there and yes that is in the pop genre now if I want to find out the second largest third largest fourth and fifth in the pop genre I could use large In a slightly different way so we're going to do a large but we're going to combine it with an if so my logical test is if the genre our photo lock is equal to pop if that's true we want to return the sales values and we want to return the second largest so I'm going to use a cell reference just here

and I also have to remember to lock this one F4 and let's close off our large formula let's hit enter we can copy this down and then apply our Formatting let's do that again but this time for the lowest sales in the hip-hop genre so once again we can use Min IFS to find the very lowest value so our Min range is what we want to return so that's going to be the sales we need to do F4 to log our criteria and our criteria range well our criteria range is going to be genre F4

to lock and this time we're looking for hip hop so we want to put that in Quote marks close the bracket hit enter and there we go and if we want to find out the second lowest we can use small and combine it with if our logical test is if the genre F4 to lock is equal to hip-hop then we want to return if that's true the sales F4 to lock but we want to return the second largest Close off our small function hit enter and then we can safely drag this down last thing to

do is just to apply some formatting so let's add a comma separator and take those decimal places all the way down so that is how you can use large and small and also a little bit of a look at Max ifs and Min ifs as well if you weren't familiar with those two useful functions In this lesson we're going to talk about ranking data within a list and the example that we're going to use is a list of movies in column A and then in column B we have the number of five star reviews that

those movies have received and what we want to do in column C is rank those movies according to the number of five star reviews so effectively I want to see which movies have the highest number of five star reviews all the way down to the bottom Now there are a couple of ways that I could do this and the most obvious one would be to Simply sort this column column B and have the highest value at the top going all the way down to the lowest but the issue that you have when it comes to

sorting is that it's going to sort the movie titles as well and I want to keep these in the order that they're currently in so instead what I could do is I could have another column column C where I Just list out the rank of each movie which position in the list it falls into according to the number of five star reviews so for this we're going to use the rank function in Excel now the first thing you'll notice here when you type in rank is that you get a number of different options come up

in excel's intellisense menu and we're only really interested in the top three now notice rank which is the third one in this list this function is the one That we used to use in older versions of Excel and it's still there as a legacy feature for anybody who's still using a very old version of excel the functionality of the rank function has since been replaced with the function above rank dot EQ so this is the one that we're going to use for this first example let's press the Tab Key to select it now the rank

function has three arguments number reference and then we have a third optional argument Order and this is a really straightforward formula to use the first thing we need to provide is the number that we want to rank so that is going to be cell B4 the reference is what we want to rank it against so I want to rank this value in cell B4 against the other values in column B now because I don't have any other data other than the data that I'm currently using in column B I could select the entire column simply

by clicking at the Top of the column heading if I did have additional data further down here it would work out better for me to highlight the exact cell reference but for this example we can use the column let's close the bracket hit enter and now I can double click to fill that formula down so I can see that the movie 12 Angry Men is ranked 12th by the number of five-star movie reviews and if we scroll down look through this list I can see Here if I'm looking for the number one reviewed movie I

can see that it's The Departed now when we typed in this formula there was an additional optional argument on the end which is order now if I press the comma here notice that we can choose if we want to rank these in descending if we want to rank these in descending or ascending order and the default here is descending but if I change this to a 1 on the end and press return and then double click to copy That down 12 Angry Men if we're working from the bottom of the list is in the 39th

position and effectively the movie that's ranked 1 will be the one with the fewest 5 Star reviews and that one would be Seven Samurai now I'm going to just edit this formula and and I don't want to sort them in ascending order let's put that back to descending and double click to copy that formula down now if I was to sort these five star reviews this is going to make them a little bit Easier to see so let's go to data and let's sort these largest to smallest now what would happen if I had two

movies that achieved exactly the same number of five star reviews so let's cheat a little bit here and change the one underneath the Green Mile to the same value so 9714 take a look at what happens to the rank it's going to assign it the same number also notice that now it's skipped over number five also notice that we don't Have a movie ranked in the fifth position because we have two movies occupying the fourth position so just something to be aware of when you're working with rank EQ let's take a look at another example

this time I'm going to show you rank average which is the other function that we have in that drop down list now what I have here are some dates and we have some calls logged so maybe this is some information from a call center and we're just reviewing how Many calls they logged on any particular day so what I can do here let's do a rank first of all I'm going to do rank EQ again let's just select that one my number is going to be the number of calls logged and my reference well I

want to compare it to the rest of the values in column B I'm happy with the default of descending order so I don't need that final argument let's hit enter and then I can double click to copy that down and this Is going to show me the days that achieve the highest number of calls and once again I could sort this list to make it a bit easier but I can see that this is in the number one position so on January the 4th 2022 we received the highest amount of calls of 197. now what

about rank average what does that one do so let's type in equals we're going to go for rank again and the top option there is rank average now this has exactly the same arguments so Let's do the same thing we're going to rank cell B4 against everything else in column B and we're going to saw in descending order so we'll just accept the default I'm going to do Ctrl enter to stay in the same cell and then I can double click to copy that down now I'm going to sort these calls into sending order to

make this a bit easier to see so let's sort largest to smallest and you'll find that the rank average is the same for many of these so you can see Here for three four five six seven eight nine ten so on and so forth it's pretty much the same but take a look at these first two the rank average is 1.5 whereas the rank is one so what's occurring here well effectively the way that Excel works out the rank average is it says this value is in position one and this value is in position two

so if you add one and two together you get three and what would be the average of three over these two items well it would Be 1.5 so that is where it gets its average from the same thing down here this value is in position 16. this value is in position 17. so if you add 16 and 17 together you get 33 what's 33 divided by 2 well it is 16.5 so that is the difference between Rank and also rank average count blank is one of those formulas that pretty much does exactly what it says

on the 10. counts all blank cells in a selected Range and sometimes this can be really useful in many different scenarios so let's take a look at how count blank works now in this first example we have a table on the left hand side that just has some order IDs some customer names and then we have email addresses for some of our customers now it appears that some of the customers haven't left their email address when they've placed an order so I've been tasked by my manager to go through all of our Customers and tell

him how many haven't left an email address and this is really going to determine if we're going to spend any money on developing our order system and making email addresses mandatory prior to placing an order so I can use the count blank function for this and it works exactly as you would expect we're going to type in equals and it's this one just here count blank and we have one argument for this and that is the range of cells so all I need to Do here is Select this range C4 to c23 and it's going

to tell me that out of 20 customers seven of them have not left their email address now currently this data that I'm reviewing isn't in a table so as I add more customers to the bottom of this list my count blank formula isn't going to update so again this is another reason why using tables is so important let's press Ctrl T click on OK and I'm going to leave the table style as it is Let's give our table a name we're going to call this orders and now I'm going to update my count blank formula

so let's replace the cell reference with the table name this time and hit enter so now if we add a new customer onto the bottom so let's say the order number is one zero two zero and I'm just going to use my name why not notice that my formula has updated so now we have eight people in the list who don't have an Email address now if I was to add my email address in here and I will say that this isn't my actual email address but let's add one in and hit enter that count

blank formula goes back down to seven because it's no longer a blank cell so make sure that you put your data in a table and then your count blank formula will constantly update now another quick Tip here notice as I've entered in my email address it's automatically turned into a hyperlink now the other email addresses in here are not hyperlinked so if you just want to remove that hyperlink and just have it as plain text just right click on the cell and choose remove hyperlink let's take a look at another example of using count blank

now what I have in the table on the right hand side are a list of employees and I have days of the week across the top and Then I have a y which tells me on which days these employees are scheduled to work and the first thing I want to do here is I want to just do a count of how many days each employee is working so this is just a straightforward count a I'm going to select this row close the bracket and hit enter and then I can copy that formula down and that

just lets me know how many days each of my employees is scheduled to work now what about if my manager comes to me and he's Looking at rearranging the scheduling around a little bit because we need more cover on certain busier days what would be really useful to know is how many employees are off on Mondays ham you're off on Tuesdays Wednesdays so on and so forth and this is where the count blank function can come in really handy in a practical example so let's go for count blank our range we just want to select

Monday close the bracket hit enter and then I Can drag this formula across and I can see how many employees we have off each day so on Saturday we have the most amount of employees off but Friday and Saturday are our busiest evenings so this is really going to help my manager when it comes to analyzing how he wants to reorder the scheduling of stuff so count blank can be used in many different situations and is a really useful formula to have in your Excel toolkit It's time now to do exercise four and in this

exercise we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in this section so in the first part of this exercise I'd like you to practice using average median and mode and I'd like you to find the average median mode for the numbers in the table and I want you to ensure that when you're calculating the mode you return all values that occur more than once in The second part of this exercise I'd like you to practice using the large and small functions so first I'd like you to find the top three largest values

in the table and then I'd like you to return the corresponding product so think about the formula you might need to use in order to do that I'd then like you to find the top three smallest values in the table and then return the corresponding product and when you're doing this I'd like you To ensure that you use cell references instead of hard-coded values wherever possible and also ensure that you apply the correct absolute referencing and in the final part of this exercise I'd like you to practice using the rank function so I'd like you

to rank the scores of each student in descending order and then finally I'd like you to sort the table by rank so the highest scoring students are at the top so give that a go if you'd like to see my answer then Please keep watching so the first thing I asked you to do here was find the average median and mode for the numbers in the table so this is pretty straightforward we're going to go into an average calculation we need to select all of the numbers in the table and that's going to give us

the average next we need to find the median so again this is a straightforward calculation we're going to select all of the numbers again And hit enter and that is our median value again note that the median value is different to the average finally I asked you to find the mode of the numbers in the table and I added a little note here to ensure that when calculating the mode make sure you return all values that occur more than once so the reason why I specified that is because when we go into mode we have

two options here mode dot mult or mode Single so if we want to return all values that occur more than once we need to use mode Dot mult I let's select our values once again close the bracket hit enter and I can see that those values occur more than once in the table let's move on to the next worksheet so the first thing I want you to do here was to find the top three largest values in the table and then return the corresponding product now when it comes to finding the largest I Could use

the large function or I could still use max here so if you used either of those that's absolutely fine I'm going to go with large let's select it I'm looking for the largest value so this is our array and I want to find the largest so that is my second argument now I also mentioned in the notes that we need to use cell references wherever possible so instead of typing in here one to return the largest I'm going to use the cell Reference that contains the number one let's close the bracket and hit enter now

because I want to copy this formula down I need to make sure that I'm locking the sales array in the table so let's make sure that we F4 just there hit enter and then I can copy this down now in order to find the product I can do a simple index match so let's type in equals index what do we want to return well we want To return the product name this time so that's our array again we need to lock that because we want to drag this formula down we now need to find the

row number so let's go straight into a match we're going to use the sales value as the lookup value comma where are we looking that up well we're looking it up in the sales array F4 to lock and we want to do an exact match close-off match close off index control Enter and now we can drag this down let's do exactly the same to find the top three smallest values in the table so this is a very similar process we're just using the small function instead so we're looking for the smallest sales value in this

array F4 to lock and we want to find the smallest I'm going to use a cell reference close the bracket Ctrl enter and then we can copy down now once again to find the product I could use an indexer match I could Even use an X lookup here if I wanted to so let's just switch it up and go for that instead so let's say x lookup our lookup value is f 11. we're looking it up in this array just here we need to lock that F4 and our return array is going to be the

product F4 to lock close the bracket Ctrl enter and now we can copy that down let's move on to the final part of this exercise which was using the rank function so I wanted you to use rank to rank the Scores of each student in descending order so let's do this part first of all I'm going to click in column D and we're going to use our rank function now remember we have a few to choose from here we want to choose rank EQ now the numbers that we want to rank are in this array

just here and again I want to copy this down so we're going to do F4 what's our reference what am I ranking them against well I'm ranking them against each other so my second Part is going to be this cell reference again F4 to lock I can then specify if I want to rank them in descending or ascending order and I asked you to rank them in descending order so we want a zero on the end here let's close the bracket Ctrl enter and take a look at that I now have a rank assigned to

all of those scores now in the final part of this exercise I asked you to sort the table by rank so the highest scoring students are at the top Now if you try to click in rank and then use your sort command so sort in ascending you'll find that you get this message just here now the way that we can overcome that is simply to throw away the underlying formula so let's select Ctrl C to copy and then we can simply paste the values now we can go to the data tab we can sort A

to Z and we can see our top ranked student at the top in this lesson we're going to talk about Rounding values and specifically three functions round round up and round down and these three functions are excellent functions to know but are particularly important if you work in the financial sector where being extremely accurate with money is the highest priority so let's take a quick look at how rounding works now in this first table I just have some order IDs I have a price and then I have the price plus tax and you can see

over here we have a sales tax Rate of 2.5 percent now the price plus tax I've already added in the calculation for this this is a very straightforward calculation that most of us probably know how to do by this stage we're doing B4 which is the price multiplied by the sales tax 2.50 and then we're adding on the price again because if we don't add on that price if I was just to remove this it's just going to give us the amount to increase by so we do need to make sure that we Are in

addition adding on the price again to the sales tax amount to get the total so for this first order order 1000 the price is 488 the price plus tax is five dollars now what about if this customer just here decided that they wanted to order a thousand items what is the price going to be well this is a fairly straightforward calculation that most of us can do in our mind because it's simply going to be the price multiplied by one thousand Five multiplied by a thousand is five thousand so effectively when we do this calculation

we should get a result of five thousand let's see what happens I'm going to type in equals let's do C4 multiplied by the volume and hit enter take a look at that I don't get five thousand I get five thousand and two now why am I getting 5002 and not 5000. well this is because of this number just here Notice that I'm displaying two decimal places now the mistake that a lot of people make when they're looking at numbers is that they think that this is the actual real value of the number but because we've

minimized this down to two decimal places if I was to increase these decimals and reveal a few more of those numbers underneath you're going to start to see why we're getting a result of five zero zero two as I increase the decimals and I've just increased them by One the actual number is five zero zero two which is why when we multiply it by a thousand we're getting a result of five zero zero two because increasing and decreasing these decimal places doesn't actually change the underlying value you're just changing the way that the number is

displayed now how can we get this to be accurate because we do want this to say five thousand well this is where we can use rounding so we're going to use the round function to make Sure that we're rounding to an even number of pen knees so let's click on this cell we're going to jump up to the formula bar and we're going to use the round function now notice in the drop down list there we have a few different options we're going to choose the first one the first argument here is the number now

the number is going to be generated by the formula that we already have in this cell So if we just click at the end and press comma the only other argument we have here is the number of digits so how many decimal places are we rounding to so I want to round to the penny so I'm going to round to two digits if I wanted to round to the dollar I would have a 0 in here so let's go for two let's close the bracket and hit enter and would you take a look at that

now our answer has changed to five thousand and if I start To copy this formula down some of these will change some of them may not and I can then double click to copy this formula down now it might be that you want to override the standard rounding rules and round up all round down to a specific number of decimal places well as you might have guessed we have two functions that can help us with that and they are called Roundup and round down so let's edit our formula and this time we're going to use

round up I'm going to Keep it rounding up to two decimal places and if we hit enter notice that now it's rounded it up to the next Penny if I wanted to round it up to the next dollar I would put a zero in here and it's going to round it up to six now I don't want that I want to round it to the penny so let's put that back to two and once again I can double click to copy that formula down and you may have noticed that some of these numbers also changed

and of course we can do the Opposite of this we can use the round down formula instead I'm going to keep it on two decimal places let's hit enter it's rounded down to five if I double click again some of these are changing and rounding down to the nearest penny so just be aware of that when you're working with rounding make sure you understand the different options that you have and whether you're rounding to the nearest Penny the nearest Dollar so on and so forth now before we leave this Lesson there's just one final thing

that I want to show you now in column A we have some salaries and all of the people who have these salaries have got a Bonus of 2.15 percent and we have their new salary including that bonus in column B but do you notice one difference between column B and column A in column B all of these salaries are nice and neat they're rounded nicely to the dollar whereas the original salaries aren't now the way That you can do that and I've already written this formula out in this column is I'm using round up we're

doing our calculation so we're doing a29 which is the salary we're multiplying it by the percentage of bonus and then we're adding the salary again but take a look at this last argument we're doing a minus two for the number of digits and this method will basically round to the nearest a hundred dollars if I was to replace this with a minus one it's going To round to the nearest ten dollars so let's change that and copy it down and you'll see that all of these will change so again just be aware that you can

use minus figures as well as this last argument for the number of digits in this lesson we're going to explore some specialized rounding functions and these are all in the rounding wheelhouse but they do slightly different things so the functions that we're going to be looking at in this lesson are m round Ceiling and floor so let's take a look at the data that we're going to be using so in column A we have some order IDs in column B we have price and then in column C we have the price plus tax so pretty

much the same as the last example we were looking at and there is the sales tax that we're using to perform this calculation and we already have rounding applied to this to two decimal places now what if I want to do something slightly different Maybe I want all prices to be multiples of five cents or 10 cents or 20 cents or maybe 50 cents well if we want to do that then we can use the m round function which is going to allow us to round to a variety of different multiples so instead of round

let's choose m round and I can simply add an M onto the front here now mround has two arguments number and multiple and once again the number is going to be generated by the formula that we Currently have now I want to get rid of the multiple on the end there because we want to specify what multiple we want to round by so maybe I want to round to the nearest 50 cents so I'm going to put in here point five o and let's double click to copy this down and this now looks a lot

neater because we've rounded to the nearest 50 cents if I wanted to round to the nearest 20 cents I could change that to 0.2 and hit Enter and then when we copy this down you're going to see those figures change 0.1 for the nearest 10 cents once again we can double click to copy down and note add changed values so m round is a really flexible function which will just allow you to round to different multiples now what are ceiling and floor well these work along the same lines but ceiling means we're rounding up whereas

floor means we're rounding down so ceiling works like m round where we can Specify Arrow multiple but it's going to round up and floor lets us specify our own multiple but it's going to round down so if I was to change m round to ceiling notice that the ceiling function is one of those Legacy functions so it's since been replaced with the ceiling.math function so let's select that we have three arguments number significance and mode now the number once again is going to be Generated by the formula that we already have let's delete out our

previous multiple the significance argument is basically the multiple it's just been named something slightly different in this function so if I want to round up to the next 50 cents I would do exactly the same thing put .50 in here and then there is a third argument which is also optional and that is mode a mode is really there to deal with negative values that you have in your data and You can specify if you want to round towards or away from zero now we don't have any negative values so we don't need that argument

let's press enter and you can see what happens it's now rounding it up to the nearest 50 cents and I'm sure you can guess what floor does pretty much the same thing but the opposite way around let's replace ceiling.math with floor again we have the same situation here floor is an old function That has since been replaced with floor.math the same arguments here so this time let's round down to the nearest 10 cents and let's double click to copy that down and there we go so three additional rounding functions there which are really handy to

know particularly if you work in the financial industry the aggregate function is a great little function to know what it does is it enables us to calculate Aggregates like Sum average count mean Max whilst ignoring things like errors hidden rows subtotals and one of its main uses that I find is to perform some calculations and ignore any errors that we have in cells now aggregate if you're looking for it in the functions Library if we click on the formulas tab you'll actually find it under the math and trig group and it's this one just here

and if we take a look at the screen tip it says it returns an aggregate in a list or Database so let's take a look at a quick example of how this works on the spreadsheet I just have a very simple list we have just some items and then we have the price for those items now notice that I have a couple of cells in this price column that contain errors I've got some div errors in there now it might be that instead of taking up time trying to work out why I'm getting these div

errors I just want to Perform a calculation on the rest of the prices well aggregate is going to allow me to do that because it's going to let me ignore any error values that I have in cells so let's type in equals aggregate now the first argument is producing a drop down list so that we need to select here what kind of calculation we want to do do we want to do an average or a count or a Min or a Max Well I want to do a sum so I can simply type in number

nine or I can select it from the list by pressing the Tab Key comma to move on to the next argument now this is where I can specify what criteria I want to ignore and it's definitely worth taking a look through some of these number three in particular is pretty hardcore because it will ignore hidden rows error values nested subtotals and also other aggregate functions now in this first example We're going to start off with a very basic number six we want it to ignore those div errors that we have in the cells so once

again I could just type in number six or I can select it from the menu and press the Tab Key now notice underneath where we can see our arguments we have two different ways that we can put together an aggregate now the one that we're currently doing is this bottom one we've provided the function number the options and now we Need to provide the reference so this is basically just the column that we want to aggregate so I'm going to select B4 to B 14. let's close off the function and hit enter and it's adding

up all of those numbers and ignoring these two now let's take a look at another example what I'm going to do here is I'm going to apply some filters to these headings and I'm going to hide some rows so let's say that I'm only interested in blouses dresses Hats and let's go for trousers and sportswear click on OK so now my data contains both hidden rows and also we still have this error value in here so I want to use the aggregate function so I can do account but I wanted to ignore the hidden rows

and I want it to ignore the errors as well so let's type in aggregate this time we're going to do a count so that is number two comma now we want to ignore hidden rows and Error values and that is the option that we have all the way at the bottom option number seven comma the last thing we need to provide is the cell range which is B5 to be 14. let's close the bracket and hit enter and I just need to change the formatting on this cell and take those decimal places down it's telling

me that we have four items and notice that we do once we're ignoring this item just here so we have blouse hat dress and sportswear so Aggregate is a super useful function if you want to perform some kind of aggregation but you want to ignore certain values it's time now to complete exercise five where we're going to practice some of the skills that we've learned in this section of the course so the first thing I'd like you to do is to practice rounding so I'd like you to calculate the total including tax in column D

for each of The invoices and you can see we have the sales tax amount this did in cell G3 and I'd like you to ensure that when you do this calculation you round up to two decimal places in the next part of this exercise I'd like you to practice more specialized rounding so I'd like you to calculate the bonus for each employee in column C I then like you to calculate the new salary for each employee in column d and then I'd like you to use specialized Rounding to round the new salary to the nearest

100 so think about which function allows you to do that and then in the final part of this exercise I'd like you to practice using the aggregate function so I'd like you to use the aggregate function to complete the total and the average of all prices including tax and when you perform this calculation I'd like you to ignore errors and hidden Rows see how you get along with that and if you'd like to see my answer then please keep watching so the first part of this exercise is fairly straightforward the first thing we need to

do here is calculate the total including tax in column D so we're going to do a sum here and we're going to say C4 multiplied by G3 and we need to lock that cell reference because we want to copy this Down and then we want to plus the amount now currently I haven't applied any rounding to this at all and that was the second part of this exercise I wanted you to ensure that you rounded up these totals to two decimal places so we need to make a modification to this formula and we need to

specify that we want to round up the number is going to be generated by our sum calculation so we can jump Straight to the end and just specify how many digits we want to round up to so in this case that is two digits close the bracket Ctrl enter and then we can double click to copy down nice and straightforward let's move on to the second part of this exercise where I asked you to use specialized rounding to calculate the new salary so the first thing we need to do here is we need to calculate

the bonus for each Employee in column C so we just want the bonus amount so we can just do B3 multiplied by G2 remember F4 to lock control enter let's double click to copy this down now we need to work out what the new salary is so that's going to be a straightforward sum calculation of adding salary and bonus together so let's do that first of all we're going to say equal sum and we just want to do B3 Plus C3 L enter and if I copy this down take a look at these numbers they're

kind of a bit all over the place we want these to be nice multiples of a hundred so what we can do here is use the m round function so let's go up to the formula bar and edit this first one we're going to use m round the number will be generated by the sum Calculation and then we just need to specify the multiple now I want to round to the nearest 100 so I'm just going to type in 100 close the bracket Ctrl enter And now when I double click to copy this down you

can see we get nice rounded numbers to the nearest one hundred dollars the final part of this exercise was to use the aggregate function to complete the total and average for all of the prices inclusive of tax and I wanted you to Ignore errors and hidden rows so if you take a look at my data I have some calculations going on here but I also have some errors in my data as well so I still want to perform a total and an average but I want to ignore those errors and also any hidden rows and

I can see that I've got a hidden row here row 16 is currently hidden so let's do the total first of all we're going to go into aggregate we now need to choose our function now I want to use Sum so I could just type in 9 or use my arrow keys and select it now I can choose what I want to ignore so I want to ignore hidden rows and error values so the one that closest fits that is the bottom one just here comma we now need to select the array that we want

to find the total of so that is this array just here and that is pretty much all we need close the bracket hit enter and we get our total We need to do exactly the same but this time we're going to do an average so let's select aggregate we're doing an average let's type in number one and we want to do the same thing so number seven to ignore hidden rows and error values let's select our array close the bracket and hit enter and now I can apply my number formatting so I'm going to take

the decimal places for this one down to two and let's add a Comma separator I think that looks a lot better if you're not a subscriber click down below to subscribe so you get notified about similar videos we upload to get the course exercise files and follow along with this video click over there and click over there to watch more videos on YouTube from Simon says it