You won’t eat dinner on these tables

We are so proud of the blog posts we’ve been sharing for the past 18 months, and we love the feedback from all of you. I hope you indulge me as I finally break down and nerd out for just one post — I have got to talk about Microsoft Excel. If you don’t love Excel like me, you can pass on this one and we’ll see you in three weeks.

I am a big fan of Francis Hayes over at The Excel Addict. His weekly emails to more than 36,000 people always contain valuable nuggets. Readers always know that one of his tricks will save you five seconds, five minutes or more. So when The Excel Addict talks about free training, I listen. Recently, I attended an hour-long webinar on pivot tables. It was fast paced! Perfect for me!

Now, I use pivot tables fairly often — they’re just the greatest way to look at data — but this trick has elevated my Excel usage to a whole new level. And I promise you I’m not the only one.

Ready for the game-changer? When working with a dataset, convert it to a table. (You thought I was going to say “use Slicers” didn’t you? Not even close!)

The key takeaway from the training session was that pivot tables, which are based on data in a table, eliminate the need to ever use the “Change Data Source” button. But that is just the tip of the iceberg.

How Excel tables have changed my life

I know what you’re thinking — she’s exaggerating. But I challenge you to start using tables for the smallest and simplest of things. Use tables on any list of data you have.

If you’re still reading, you’re an Excel junkie too. Here’s why tables have been great for me.

• Use Ctrl-T to convert your data to a table.
• Adding totals at the bottom is easier than writing SUM or AVERAGE or MIN or MAX formulas.
• Writing a formula against the data in a table is easier.
• Adding a new data point to the right, in the middle… when you start to populate that new area, Excel is smart enough to know that you want to carry that all the way down.
• Removing duplicates. Genius!
• Auto filtering: of course you made that a default!
• The formatting that is common within Excel now is easy on the eyes when applied to tables.

I’d love to hear from anyone nerdy enough to put this to the test. I spent the first five days after the training reaffirming to myself how much tables have changed my Excel life.

Thanks for obliging. And a big thanks to Francis Hayes for getting this to his readers for free.