Do You Use These Advanced Features in Microsoft Excel?

Advanced Excel training at Intellisoft
Practical hands-on advanced excel training at Intellisoft
Practical hands-on advanced excel training at Intellisoft

Most people hardly use the huge number of features available in Microsoft Excel. Many are just using Excel as a calculator. This is a gross under use of Excel’s vast potential and feature rich functionality.

Do a quick check, and see if you use these advanced features of Microsoft Excel in your day to day work.

Some of the common things that can be done easily with Excel are:

  1. Finding the Top 10 Customers or Finding the Bottom 10 Performers in the organization
  2. Highlight values that are above or below a certain threshold – like all sales above $25,000 to be highlighted
  3. Sort the values in Ascending, Descending or any customized order – like sorting in order of Manufacturing, Accounts, Sales departments.
  4. Give Names to Range of Cells, and then use them in formulas for easy referencing and decoding
  5. Exploit Pivot Tables to Summarize the data and slice & dice it in any way – finding sales by product groups, or calculating productivity by department
  6. Write Macros to automate routine things that save you a huge amount of time – example creating pivots, charts, tables, and doing complex calculations automatically.
  7. Use advanced filtering conditions, and be able to filter data using multiple different criteria
  8. Create fantastic charts that portray the given business situation perfectly. There are over 50 different types of charts to choose from, and each has its edge, advantages and a reason.
  9. Create management dashboard that are dynamic, and provide a complete snapshot of the key business KPIs in the company – change the chart values at the click of a checkbox or change in a drop-down value
  10. Use Excel’s advanced What-If analysis to do projections for future, forecasting, trend analysis etc. with ease
  11. Use Lookup tables to find any value or corresponding value from a table using advanced functions and formulas

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Microsoft Excel is really extremely powerful. Each version of Microsoft Excel – be it Excel 2007, or Excel 2010 or Excel 2013 adds more and more features to the already powerful dynamite of a package.

At Intellisoft, we teach people how to leverage the maximum power out of Microsoft Excel in short training courses. Some of the popular courses are:

We have a number of Public Classes each month, and we also provided In-House Training to your staff and team at your office, if you have a group of 10+ people, and have a room to hold the training.

So what are you waiting for? If you would like to learn any one or more of such useful features of Microsoft Excel, come for a short Excel Training at Intellisoft.

Go ahead, equip your team with the right skills. Get everyone on board to learn the basic and advanced features of Microsoft Excel, and Be Awesome in Excel!

Email to training@intellisoft.com.sg or call +65-6250-3575 for the next available schedule of Microsoft Excel Training in Singapore.

We are located at Fortune Centre, in Singapore! Location Map of Intellisoft

Cheers,
Vinai Prakash, PMP, ITIL, Six Sigma, GAP,
Master Trainer

Why You Should Train Your Staff

 Employee TrainingMost businesses are always in a state of crisis, fighting some fire or the other each day. By the time one fire is put off, they find themselves involved in putting off another fire.

This is the nature of all operational work.

Similarly, if you  are working on a project, things keep changing, you keep moving from one crisis to another – nothing stays the same…

Only “change is constant”.

Thus, we hardly have time to think, to plan ahead, and to be proactive. Most of our actions each day are pretty “reactive”. This is the worst position to be in. There is a total lack of control, and many a time you will feel totally “overwhelmed”… not sure what to do, where to begin, and what to do to get out of this mess or chaos.

Steven Covey, in his famous book  The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People talks about Being Proactive (the First Habit), and Sharpen The Saw (The Seventh Habit).

What is Being Proactive?

This simply means that you do not wait for things to happen. Rather, prevent them, avoid them, and circumvent them. Have a long term view, plan, so you can see the pitfalls immediately, and you can then plan for any foreseen eventuality, and be prepared. If you are prepared, you know what to do when the event happens, if it happens. This is being proactive. It is totally in your hands.

You can take aside some time each day – ideally in the morning, or the last thing in the day, to plan your day, and actions for the next day or week in advance. Our mind, our brain is a goal seeking device. If you give it a goal, it will find ways to achieve it!

Sharpen The Saw

Continuous Training Opportunities to Stay Ahead - Sharpen the SawCovey talks about a wood cutter so busy with the work, that he has no time to sharpen the saw. Thus, he toils to cut the tree, but this task takes ever longer, due to the fact that the saw is in a pretty bad shape. The wood cutter knows that the instrument is blunt, but does not want to spend the time to sharpen the saw.

It is a pretty simple story, and makes perfect sense.

But aren’t you doing the same? You have no time to plan ahead, no time to do the right things, no time to think and then act. You believe in ‘shoot first, and think later’.

An Emerging Economy

We are living in a world of unprecedented change. Things change very fast. Each morning you pick up the newspaper, and find out some new rules imposed by the government. You can not even anticipate what their next step is going to be. You have to react in this situation. Even if our country’s economy is stable, it is impacted by the US economy, China, India and the smaller third world countries. Interest rates, inflation, GDP, economic growth rate, ERP, COE, Housing prices, petrol price, US economy, exports, exchange rates, all are changing all the time.

With so many variables, what are you supposed to do?

You Are The Commander of Your Ship

There are hundreds of things that you can control. Your thoughts, your actions, your plans can be managed and controlled. They are not cast in stone, but you can control, change, and achieve them. All you need is a little persistence, determination, and focus.

Plan for a better future. Take some time to plan, and define your actions. Just be flexible, and be ready to adapt, in case someone throws a spanner in your plans.

Invest in your Future. Now. How?

Make sure you have the right skills to do the job, and a little more. And also make sure that your team, your staff is also equipped  the same way. When we have thought of every event that can derail the project, plan what we could do, what we would do if it happens, we are much more in control.

Training is the Key

Training is like sharpening the saw. A trained worker is a happy worker. He or she takes pride in the work, and has a heightened sense of self satisfaction.

Employee Training Skills

Some of the known, proven benefits of training the workers are

  1. Increased Productivity – you get more things done, with a better quality, and improve the productivity of the employees, as well as your products and services. The government is also giving generous grants to improve the productivity of the workforce. Make use of these grants.
  2. Lower Cost – less rework, less repair, and a higher quality reduces cost overall, and improve the product. This produces cost savings for your organization.
  3. Higher Satisfaction – with a better quality product or service, the team is happier, and take pride in the company and its products or services. It raises their self esteem, morale, and generates a feeling of self satisfaction.
  4. Lower Turnover – with a higher self-worth, a higher self satisfaction, the employees want to stay in your organization, and this will reduce the turnover. Thus, you do not need to train the staff frequently, and they add value by giving suggestions to improve the product, processes, services, and directly

Thus, you can see how training sets a chain reaction of improved productivity, lower costs, satisfied employees and customers, and a higher brand recognition.

With so many benefits of training, you must look for every opportunity to “sharpen the saw“, and generate the maximum benefit, maximum productivity, and maximum satisfaction for your company, your employees, and your customers.

To learn more about how you can use training to improve your business, give the Intellisoft Training team a call at +65 6250-3575. I am sure you will benefit from it.

Cheers,
Vinai Prakash

Director, Training Services

Vinai Prakash holds a Masters Degree in E-Commerce and is a certified PMI Project Management Professional. He is currently the Director &  Principal Trainer at Intellisoft, providing training to commercial and government organizations in Project Management Methodology, and in various other programs to analyze data, manage IT projects, learn soft skills.

Armed with 27 years of solid management experience, he is the most sought after Trainer and  Consultant at Intellisoft. He has taught Project Management, IT Outsourcing, Business Intelligence, Data Interpretation & Analysis courses in Asia, Middle East, Africa & Australia for Intellisoft clients.

Let us know if you would like to speak to him about your organization’s unique training requirements.

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