IT skills and training

Modifying Charts

Adding Chart Elements

When creating charts/graphs in Excel you may find that some labels are not added by default and must be added manually or are in an unsuitable place. Excel also allows for modification of these labels, as well as their placement. In this example i'm going to amend a pie chart. If you are not sure how to create a pie chart, you can find a guide on chart creation here.

IF Functions

IF functions

If functions are used when we want to specify a criteria to limit our function to. For instance, if we were interested in values above a certain amount we could use =countIf in order to count the number of the values in a range, that are above a certain value. There are multiple different functions that can use IF's. These include:

=SumIF

=CountIF

=averageIF

Sparklines

Sparklines

A sparkline is a small graphic designed to give a quick representation of numerical or statistical information within a piece of text, taking the form of a graph without axes. This is displayed within a single cell and can be used to visualise data when you don't have enough room or it isn't suitable for a full size chart.

Conditional formatting

Conditional Formatting

 

Conditional formatting is a feature that has a variety of uses. Mainly surrounding different ways of displaying data corresponding to the value found within the cell or range of data. This can help you visualise the data faster than reading off the values using colour schemes and icon sets to show the quantities or differences between values more effectively than numbers would at a glance. 

 

Fill Handle

Flash fill and the fill handle

The fill handle can be used in a variety of ways that may save you time. From repeating sequences or repeating data to repeating a formula over a large area. 

The fill handle is the name given to the green dot found on the bottom right corner of the selected cell/s.

Cell Referencing

Relative cell references and absolute cell references

Cell references are used in almost all functions and they interact differently with the Auto-fill handle depending on what type of reference you have used:

Find and replace

Excel - Find and Replace

Find and/or replace is a powerful feature that allows you to search for a text string within your data set. It will show you all of the times that Excel can see the text string in your document, allowing you to be taken to the next word by clicking the 'next' button. If you then wish to replace a text string with your own input, en masse or individually.

Mathematical Operatives

What is a Mathematical operator?

This page will guide you through using Excel to create basic mathematical operations. This is very similar to creating a function or formula except that we are not using the function's operative such as (=Sum) or (=Average) or any of the other function operative.

If we wanted the sub-total for a given range we can use the function operative (SUM):

=Sum(A1:A10)