Excel Explained: Filtering and Formatting Data

In this helpful session, Excel expert David Ringstrom, CPA, shares various ways you can streamline filtering tasks, including little-known shortcuts, such as Custom Views and the hidden AutoFilter command. He also discusses Conditional Formatting and explains how to resolve somewhat challenging issues, including how to remove non-breaking spaces from reports you copy from cloud-based software or from text with carriage returns.

David teaches from the version of Excel used by the majority of attendees, but he explains any differences in Excel 2007, 2010, 2013, and 2016. His webcasts are fast-paced, and attendees often are surprised at the amount of ground he covers in a session. He welcomes participants’ questions, so come ready to pick his brain.

David’s detailed handouts serve as reference tools you can fall back on after participating in his webcasts. In addition, he provides an Excel workbook that includes a majority of the examples he uses during each session.

Covered Topics:

• Apply different filter settings with just a couple of mouse clicks using the Custom Views feature.
• Avoid retyping data or cumbersome formulas by way of Excel’s Text to Columns command.
• Bypass filter drop-down lists by filtering based on cell contents with a single keystroke or mouse click.
• Compile unwieldy data into the format required for pivot table analysis quickly and easily.
• Identify duplicates in a list using Conditional Formatting.
• Learn how the Table feature allows you to transform filtering tasks.
• Learn which features, such as Custom Views, you can’t use when one or more tables exist in a workbook.
• See two techniques for determining if conditional formatting has been applied to a worksheet, and if so, where.
• Simplify repetitive tasks by creating your own keyboard shortcuts.
• Transform dates and numbers into various formats without retyping by way of custom number formats.
• Transform text by way of Excel’s UPPER, LOWER, PROPER, and TRIM functions.
• Use Conditional Formatting to color code your data, identify duplicates, and apply icons.
• Use Excel’s CODE function to identify pesky non-printing characters in your data.
• Use the CLEAN and TRIM functions to eliminate non-printing characters, such as tabs, carriage returns, and spaces, in your data that can trigger #VALUE! and other errors.
• Use the SUBSTITUTE function to strategically replace unwanted characters within your data.
• Use the Text to Columns feature to eliminate unwanted text without retyping or to separate text into columns.
• Wrangle long lists of data by filtering instead of sorting.
• Identify the Quick Access Toolbar command that can enable you to filter data with one click.
• Recognize which Excel function capitalizes the first letter of each word.
• Distinguish between worksheet functions to use when extracting characters from a cell.

Webcasts, audio conferences, and podcasts are presentations that you attend via the Internet, phone, or mobile device at a specified date and time for "live" versions, or at your convenience for "recorded" and "On-Demand" versions.

The live versions are interactive, meaning that participants can ask questions in real time, plus are a very cost-effective form of training because 1) you receive fast, convenient learning without any out-of-office time; 2) you can invite as many colleagues as you'd like to listen in on a single phone line; 3) you incur no travel expenses; and 4) you and your colleagues are back at work immediately after the session ends!

And though with recorded versions you do lose the ability to ask questions, you gain the ability to hear the presentation numerous times and to share it with others in your office.

Handout materials and the phone number for live presentations are made available to you prior to the event via email from the presenter and from the "MyAccount" link on the menu bar. Copies of the presentations are included with recorded versions.

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