When trying to track how much money your business has spent on a project in the past year, sometimes a large graph isn’t the best way to see the big picture. Sparklines—miniature charts that fit into a single Excel cell—can help you see individual trends quickly and make better decisions.
Set off your figures with Sparklines:
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On the Insert tab on the Ribbon, locate the Sparklines group.
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Select the type of Sparklines you want to insert, such as Line, Column, or Win/Loss.
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In the Create Sparklines dialog box, define your Data Range and Location Range, and then click OK.
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Draw attention to variances with Conditional Formatting.
Conditional formatting lets you set rules for how Excel cells look, based upon the information the cell contains. For example, if a department is meeting its revenue quota, the result is highlighted in green; if they are over budget, it will automatically be highlighted in red. It’s easy to set up:
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Select the data you want to conditionally format.
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On the Home tab, in the Styles group, click the arrow next to Conditional Formatting, and then click Color Scales.
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Click Manage Rules to manually set your rules and formatting options.
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Analyze massive amounts of data in a flash with PowerPivot.
PowerPivot, an add-in for Excel 2010, enables you to easily load and manipulate even the largest data sets from multiple sources. Download the add-in now.
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After installing the add-in, on the Ribbon select the PowerPivot tab and then click PowerPivot Window.
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Select the appropriate data source from the Get External Data box.
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Once you complete your analysis, you can get further insights by using Excel Pivot Tables under the View box.
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Slicers are the easy way to quickly filter data in a PivotTable report, without having to open drop-down lists to select the items that you want to filter. Here’s how:
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Select a PivotTable report.
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On the Options tab, in the Sort & Filter group, click Insert Slicer.
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In the Insert Slicers dialog box, select the PivotTable fields you want to add Slicer to, and click OK.
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In each Slicer, click the items on which you want to filter.
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