Excel Project

This was more of a refresher phase.  Being an accountant, Excel is my beast of burden.  I use it daily for some very advanced applications.   While there are some limitations on using pivot tables, this was a great exercise if for nothing else than a reminder of how easy the pivot tables are.    

One thing that is really great about pivot tables is the drill-down feature.  From within a pivot table, you can double-click on the data and a new worksheet is created that includes only the details of the data contained in the pivot table.  For example, a screen shot of the Average Increase pivot table is shown here:

 

By double-clicking in cell B6, a new worksheet is created that includes only females aged 30-39:

This can be very useful in parsing data into different elements, where the detail is only necessary for certain data parameters.  Another very useful function within Excel which is automatically applied to the pivot table features are called filters.  Filters are the drop-down buttons shown at the top of the columns within the pivot table as well as the secondary detail worksheet demonstrated above.  The following screen shot demonstrates the filter by age, but filtering is available for each column, and you can build on the filtering. 

For example, you can filter the data to include only 30 year olds by selecting only “30”, and then further filter by some other column in the data set, such as Target Achieved.  This presents the potential for targeting particular subjects for particular services. 

Excel is a very powerful application that every business person should have the skill to use.  I hope you have found this useful.