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Bridging the Gap: How Mastery in Excel Sets You Up for Success in Programming and Automation
This piece will be more reflective than our typical content, because it ties heavily into why I’m writing these posts in the first place. I was fortunate to have someone help me get started (though he still denies he did much; you know who you are) in the world of reporting and automation early in…
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Spelling It Out: Mastering Text Functions in Excel
Have you ever received a messy spreadsheet with names in ALL CAPS, or addresses all jumbled together in one cell, or perhaps product codes with extra spaces? That’s where Excel’s text functions come in. They’re the unsung heroes of data cleaning, helping you whip that wayward text into shape and save tons of manual (and…
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Making Data Pop with Conditional Formatting: For when there’s…. not… a chart for that.
Ever stared at a spreadsheet full of numbers, struggling to make sense of it all? Don’t sweat it; we’ve all been there, and sometimes the summarization provided by a chart just doesn’t work. Enter Excel’s conditional formatting, a feature that can turn that number jungle into a beautiful, comprehensible garden. We’ll be focusing on Excel…
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Charts, Graphs, and Plots, oh my! Choosing the right visualization for the story you want to tell.
Data visualization is an art and a science, combining aesthetic design with statistical accuracy to tell the most compelling story of your data. Whether you’re tracking quarterly sales, forecasting weather patterns, or just trying to make sense of your monthly budget, the right chart or graph can make all the difference. So, let’s delve into…
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Data Organization Basics: Key Concepts in Data Management for Effective Modeling
Greetings, fellow data lovers! Today we’re stepping away from the nitty-gritty of Excel and diving into the broader realm of data management. Let’s explore the key concepts of finding, cleaning, and organizing data to streamline modeling, enhance performance, and future-proof your data systems. While most of the terms here come from the more technical side…
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Power Query: Tell me you’re decent with Excel without telling me you’re decent with Excel.
Hello again, data enthusiasts! It’s time to get our hands dirty with some serious data crunching as we delve deeper into the powerful world of Power Query. In our last article, we touched on the basic features of Power Query. Now, let’s kick things up a notch and explore some commonly used options that can…
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The Many Avenues to Import Data Into Excel: A Crash Course
Hey there, data wranglers! If you’ve ever used Excel, you’ll know that one of its primary uses is managing data. But before the sorting, filtering, charting, and formula crafting, there’s an essential first step: getting the data into Excel. From the simplest method to more advanced techniques, we’re going to explore the many avenues of…
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Introducing The Excel Interface (An Overview)
Welcome back, Excel enthusiasts! Today, we’re taking a deep dive into the world of Excel, navigating through its nooks and crannies, and demystifying its powerful tools. We’re talking about the Excel interface, the gatekeeper of your data manipulation powers. Strap in, let’s start our adventure! The Home Screen: Your Starting Point The Home screen is…
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The Power of Excel’s Most Common Mathematical Formulas
Math might not be everyone’s favorite subject, but Excel makes it a whole lot friendlier with its array of mathematical formulas. Let’s peek under the hood and understand some of the most commonly used ones. But wait… What if I don’t want to know the total for all shoes sold? What if I only care…
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The Magic of Formulas
Get ready to pull back the curtain on one of Excel’s most powerful features – formulas. Excel formulas are the first thing you should reach for when you want to do something with your data more than once. Whether you’re calculating totals, finding averages, joining multiple text values, or identifying outliers in your data, formulas…
Abstract Foundations 