Picking the date

When picking the dates in Excel documents, you may accidentaly make a mistake. The ideal way to avoid this is to use the Date Picker tool. For now, there is no simple solution within the application itself that can be used for this purpose, but there is a simple add-in available that can help with the date selection process.

Fuzzy Lookup

Fuzzy Lookup is an Excel add-in created by a Microsoft development team, and can be used for advanced search and comparison of column values in tables. Why does this serve for? For example, in practice, it often happens that, when entering a name and surname, an error occurs or there is no one-way entry. Fuzzy Lookup allows you to compare the column based on the similarity and display the corresponding results in the new table.

People graph

In the previous “recipe” you could read about add-ins that you can download from the Office Store. One of them is called People Graph, and starting from the 2016 version, it’s a standard part of Excel. People Graph is convenient for showing charts that describe the results of a survey in which a population is being tested. It is used in a very simple way, and it enables the creation of picturesque reports.

Data model

Data model is used to add and connect tables in a whole, in order to retrieve the data needed for reporting. This is a pseudo-base, part of Excel document. By adding a table into the Model data are automatically compressed; later, when we need them for reporting, they are decompressed and used as a reporting dimension in the pivot table. Data model is basis for use of “Power” technologies, i.e. “self-service” business intelligence tools.