Controls

Excel offers you to add controls to documents, the same elements that you can find in windows and dialog boxes, and they enable choosing values, checking options, adding labels, choosing from list objects… Adding control to a worksheet increases interactivity between user and reports. In this way, you can easily create different polls and save the results in a form suitable for further processing.

Translating

Although it has not been initially made as a translation tool (let’s face it, most of us use Google Translate) Excel has several features that allow you to translate table names from one language to another, check the spelling and grammar, and, if possible, replace one of the labels with a synonym. It’s rare for anyone to know that these options exist, or at least never used them, so it is not bad to mention them.

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.

Hyperlinks

We meet the hyperlinks every day while surfing the Internet, and they have long time ago become part of Office applications. In Excel, this is often an unfairly ignored functionality. In addition to allowing you to go to an Internet presentation or write a letter to the specified e-mail address, a link can also be used to create a new document or position it on a prefix in an existing document.

Connecting with a database

Excel is a software with lots of features, but perhaps its best application is data analysis. In order to have something to analyze, we must retrieve the data. Operational data are held in relational databases, so we should connect to DBMS. Most of the time it is and istance of Microsoft SQL Server. When connecting we’ll importing a content of a table, view or result of a query into Excel worksheet.