The reports we analyse are often composed of a large number of interrelated formulas. Then it is convenient, for a moment, to display formulas instead of the expression. It may also be useful to look at the precedents of a formula (the cells on which it was created), as well as its dependents (the values on whose result it affects). The purpose of these procedures is to easily detect errors in the budget, or the logic that led to them.
When entering data into large tables, it often happens that some of the values that we enter are repeated. Excel offers two automations that make it easy to enter. The first one is called Autofill and starts automatically as soon as we start typing the text with a template that already existed in the current column. Flash Fill offers data filling based on forms that Excel recognizes in previous columns within the same table.
Often we fill out tables with data that are meaningful strings. This can be for example the days of the week, the names of months, and so on. Therefore, it would be convenient to have automation using just enough to enter only the first member of the string, for example, “MONDAY”, and when applying a fill-in technique to Excel, automatically fill in the other several selected fields with the names of the remaining days of the week. This automatics are the Custom Lists and will be referred to in the following text.
When entering data into a table among them, there is often a meaningful connection, that is, they belong to a certain set of data. This is most commonly encountered when filling out the regular numbers in the table. Excel has fine mechanisms for automatically filling data sets that, apart from numbers, can also be used to fill dates, as well as to copy values in a table. The following text will be about the series of data series.
Advanced filtering is a technique that is used to narrow the data set in the table based on values from another table. In this case, we can consider a second table as a filter containing one or more criteria, each assigned as a separate row in the table, where the values in the columns are filter criteria. Once created advanced filters can also be used to filter multiple tables.