The Excel Quick Analysis Tool

In this video, will show you the Excel Quick Analysis tool, which is great shortcut for adding some useful visualizations to your Excel spreadsheets. So, here have pretty big financial data spreadsheet for business, and the numbers get so big in this spreadsheet that it could be easy to get confused about what I'm looking at here. 600,000 versus 600 million, etc. Now, of course, could highlight particular column and use the conditional formatting tools to add some useful visuals to this spreadsheet and help me to be able to understand this data better. If you want to learn all about the conditional formatting tools in Excel, watch my other videos that I've made about that topic. But, in this video, want to show you an even quicker way to do something similar. Step one is to select the data that want to quickly analyze and produce visualizations for. In many cases, you can just click and drag to highlight the range that you want to use the Excel Quick Analysis tool with, but in this case, it's going to be kind of hard. There are lots and lots of different rows in this spreadsheet and many columns as well. So, what I'm going to do is hold control and tap to select everything. That selects all. And now, if look in the lower right corner of my Excel window, you can see little button has popped up. That is the Excel Quick Analysis tool. And the nice thing is, you don't have to go down to the lower right corner of your data in order to see that tool. It should pop up whether you're at the bottom of the data or at the top or in the middle. At least it works that way when you hold control and tap to select everything in big spreadsheet. I'm going to go ahead and click on it, and you can see there some of the nice visualizations that might be available to me using that Excel Quick Analysis tool. So, could add some data bars, could add some color scales, and you can see each one illustrates some truth about the numbers. In this case of color scale, the higher the number, the more green it is. So, it helps to draw attention to certain data. can also go to an icon set option. We have arrows pointing up, arrows pointing down, arrows sideways. Now, don't be concerned about the hashtag symbols that are appearing. The reason for that is because there's not enough width in each column, but that's easy to fix just by clicking and dragging. So, icon sets are another great option. There's also greater than and top 10%. There are also some chart options. can put my mouse over clustered bar to see what that chart would look like, or sum of profit by segment and year, sum of manufacturing. So, these are just quick charts that Excel is just figuring out that might want, and can get preview of each one just by putting my mouse over them. If don't want any of those, and maybe want another type of chart, could click more charts, and it brings me even more options. I'll cancel that and go back to the Excel Quick Analysis tool. In addition to formatting and charts, we also have totals. So, if go down to the bottom of the screen and select totals, can put my mouse over sum, average, count, percent total, running total. It's automatically adding totals for each column and giving me some options as to how those totals will appear. Tables are another option. can use this table here, quick pivot table, and other kinds of pivot tables. And then finally, there are some sparkline options. Now, some of these visualizations will be perfect for the spreadsheet that you're working in, and some will not. Here's my sparklines over here on the right. I'm going to undo that one, but that's one of the nice things about the Excel Quick Analysis tool. You can just try things out, and if they don't look good or if they don't make sense, if they're not useful to you, just move on to the next one and try out different visualization. After looking through these various visualizations, think I'm going to go with this color scale to again draw attention to the highest numbers, to the lowest numbers, and think I'll also add chart. I'll go to more charts, and I'll select this one here. Click okay. The chart is added to my spreadsheet. And if wanted to, could go back to the Excel Quick Analysis tool. It looks like it's disappeared, so need to redo control to get it back, and think I'll put in some totals as well. Running totals. So, next time you're working on an Excel spreadsheet that has lot of data, give the Excel Quick Analysis tool try and see what it can do to help you illustrate and draw attention to key information in your spreadsheet. Thanks for watching. hope you found this tutorial to be helpful. If you did, please like, follow, and subscribe. And when you do subscribe, click the bell so you'll be notified whenever post another video. If you'd like to support my channel, you can do that through my Patreon account, and you'll see link to that in the description below.