Illustrate your report

Icons are illustrations that we first encountered when Office 2019 appeared. Although we could find a multitude of icons, divided by categories, Office 2021 has significantly improved this segment so that now, in addition to a rich icon gallery, you can add images, transparent photos of people, stickers, or other vector images that can enhance the look of your report. Let’s see how this is used!

Collaboration on a document

Sharing and collaborating on documents in the OneDrive repository is not a new feature. Still, Office 2021 has taken it to a significantly higher level. Collaboration on a document is available in most Office applications, and in this “recipe” we will focus on Excel: how to share a document, how to see what your peers are doing, and how Sheet View works – a view of a document in which you see your own changes.

Consolidation within pivot table

In the previous texts, you could learn about several ways to consolidate data, and here we will deal with consolidation using a pivot table. To be able to achieve this we will use the Pivot Table and Chart Wizard. This is a hidden option that you can’t find in any of the ribbons (you can add it yourself, if you wish, by adjusting the layout of the ribbon), and it makes it easier to create pivot tables and charts …

Pivot table as data source

Pivot tables are reports that, above all, are used to interpret data based on given criteria. Sometimes a pivot table can also be used as a data source to make one or more new pivot tables. This usually happens when you want to create a pivot table from an existing business report, based on a query to the transaction database, and thus use the data that are available in initial pivot table.

Compressing pictures

“A picture speaks more than 1000 words” so you leave a better impression when you enrich the report with pictures. However, many users do not care how big they are and, accordingly, Excel files grow progressively. Even Office 2010 got an option for image optimization that you can use whether you use Word, Excel, PowerPoint … Optimization reduces images, which loses quality, but files take up less space. How to determine the right ratio?