Another function in excel that I began to explore this week was the table function. Tables allow you to quickly and easily analyze your data by sorting and filtering your data within the table. You can insert a table into any of your Excel worksheets. Inserting these tables allows for many features that will help you organize your data.
To insert a table into your worksheet, click any single cell inside the dataset then go to the tables tab and from here click on new. There are many different style options that you can choose from. Once you have chosen the one you want you now have a well-organized table. Now that you have created a table you can sort through your data by the category of your choice. After choosing the category you wish to sort your data by you can choose to sort it by ascending or descending. For example, in my table, if I chose to sort my data by names I could choose either A-Z or Z-A. If I were to do it by age I could choose to sort it by highest to lowest, or lowest to highest. In the picture below I sorted my data by age from lowest to highest
Another function you can do is filtering. You can filter your data within a table. For example, if you wanted to see a specific part of your data then you can specify what you want to see. To do this you click on the arrow next to the category you want to filter by and then click the item you are using to filter your data. By doing this it will show you all the data that has that item in it, but it does not erase your other data, it is still there just hidden. For example, in my worksheet, I filtered my data by the category age and I choose to do 20. This showed me a list of my friends who were 20 (picture is shown below).
Lastly, you can also calculate things from your table, such as an average, or a sum, etc. If you had a sales category and wanted to calculate the total amount then you would add in another row and call it total, and at the bottom of the sales category you would write in =SUM and click all the cells you want to include. I practiced this function on my table and calculated the total of everyone’s ages combined (see picture below).
Overall, I learned a lot of useful tips this week about inserting tables into an Excel worksheet. Once you have created a table there are many functions you can use which allow you to easily analyze, sort and filter your data, which will be of use to me. In these past weeks, I already feel much more confident in my ability to create and effectively use an Excel worksheet
Stay tuned to learn more basic functions of Excel 🙂
References:
https://www.excel-easy.com/data-analysis/tables.html
https://support.office.com/en-us/article/video-create-a-table-bf0ce08b-d012-42ec-8ecf-a2259c9faf3f
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