Some changes in Excel 2016

One of my tasks I set myself for the beginning of 2016 was to have a proper look around Excel 2016 and get to understand the changes which came with it, along with deciding whether or not I should advise our clients to upgrade. So here are my thoughts after having really played with this new Excel version…

Reassuringly familiar
If you're currently using anything from Excel 2007 onwards, then the good news is that there's nothing you have to understand in order to get started on Excel 2016. There have been a few minor tweaks in the location of certain commands on the ribbons, but nothing you won't find pretty quickly. I briefly lost the Trendline, which has been moved from the “Layout” contextual menu to a right-click menu directly on the data series on the chart.

I also found that the behaviour when grouping dates in Pivot Tables was very slightly different – some new boxes were ticked by default. Again, not a big deal, if slightly annoying.

Very pretty
Of course, this shouldn't be a consideration when considering a software upgrade, but the fact is that I just like Excel 2016. It's elegant, smooth and modern. It has nice animations when moving from one cell to another – rather than jumping straight there as in Excel 2010, the selection glides to the new cell very gracefully. The colours are nice. I just like it! Take a look at one of our videos to see it in action.

New and improved features
The main consideration should be whether the new features justify an upgrade. There are some improvements, as well as some new features which make this an attractive piece of software.

Improved autocomplete
In previous versions of Excel, the autocomplete in the formula bar brought up functions beginning with the letters typed. The improved version brings up any functions containing those letters. For example, if you've forgotten the function SUMPRODUCT but remembered it contained the word PRODUCT, you could begin typing and the SUMPRODUCT would be listed.

New functions
There are some great new functions available in Excel 2016. My favourite is the IFS function, which simplifies the use of nested IF statements to report on multiple criteria. Others include MAXIFS and MINIFS, which work the same way as the SUMIFS function from Excel 2007.

Recommended charts
One problem we often encounter when teaching or consulting in Excel is that users rarely understand which chart type is best for their data set. It's driven more by the data than by the look of the chart. The Recommended charts button suggests those charts best suited to a particular data type.

Other new features
There are other new features which are well-publicised, but in my opinion less useful, such as Excel 2016's ability to directly import data from a web page, such as Wikipedia. I can see that in theory this is useful, but in practice, it takes so little time to copy and paste from a web page, that the effort of importing automatically seems a little unnecessary.

“Cool” new language
Finally, it seems that Microsoft is trying to get “in with the kids”. Compare the language between the “save changes” dialogue in Excel 2010 and Excel 2016. It's a little more modern, I guess, but did make me chuckle that the boffins at Microsoft are now trying to be cool.

Excel 2010 

Excel 2016

So should you upgrade? Well, as with most things, it depends! If your current version is 2010 or 2013 and works well for you, then it's not urgent, although some of these new formulas could be useful. If you're on 2007 then please upgrade, because you're using a dreadful, buggy piece of software! Consider that sending a spreadsheet containing new functions to someone using an older version will cause problems, though.

As for me, I have upgraded to Excel 2016, but kept a copy of Excel 2010 for teaching purposes as it's still the most widely used Excel version and is a very robust, high-quality piece of software.

By Neil Shorney, Director, Naturally Sales Ltd.

Turning off an Excel 2010, 2013, 2016 annoyance!

Here is a great Excel tip, because it addresses one of the most irritating features of Excel 2010, 2013 and 2016 - the "Enable editing" button. For a long time this feature drove me up the wall - I would repeatedly open spreadsheets emailed to me and start typing, only to find that I had to click the "enable editing" button before I could do anything. Then I discovered that this can be turned off, and here's how...

1. Open Excel and click on the File button, then select Options 
2. Select Trust Center in the left pane and Trust Center Settings in the right pane
3. Click on Protected View in the left pane
4. Choose your options 

NOTE: However irritating it might be, the button is there for a reason, so don't disable it unless you're sure you won't be opening suspicious files. Naturally Sales Ltd accepts no responsibility for the consequences of following this e-tip. I bet that's the best Excel tip you've been given today - why not share it with a friend by clicking one of the "share" buttons below?

You can sign up to get our Excel tips by email at www.nsales.co.uk/e-tips

How to join multiple Excel cells together in one cell

Here's an email I received from a client the other day regarding a data problem she had:

"Hi Neil, I was wondering if you could help me with something. I have a column with over 1000 email addresses and I would like to join them in one cell, separated by a comma. Do you know how I can do this? The concatenate function seems to let me only add each cell at a time?"

Let's look at how we can solve this problem. It isn't really possible in Excel, but if we copy it into Word, we can achieve this quite easily as follows:

- Copy your rows into Word - they will appear in Word as a table (although the borders may not be visible)

- In Word, on the contextual toolbar "Table Tools", choose the "Layout" tab (see picture below) and "Convert to text" (on the far right-hand side)

- Choose to separate the text with paragraph marks (commas will not work at this stage)

You then have 1,000 rows of text separated by invisible paragraph marks. We now need to replace these with commas (and a space if required)

- Press CTRL+H (find & replace) and replace ^p with , (a comma, or a comma followed by a space if required – if you can’t find the ^ character, just copy if from this blog post)

There may be a few stray commas at the end which you'll need to delete.

This works in Word 2010 - if you have a different version of word there may be small differences. If it doesn't work for you, please comment on this post and I'll get in touch to help you out.

For more help with Excel data, check out our live e-learning course: Excel level 4 - Advanced Data

By Neil Shorney, Director, Naturally Sales Ltd.

Excel tip: combining a large number of values into one cell: http://t.co/zGryBGQurS

— Naturally Sales Ltd (@nsales_co_uk) October 15, 2015

Rounding up to the nearest 10 (or 100, or 1000)

We've looked in the past at how to round up (or down) to the nearest x decimal places, or whole number, but someone asked me the other day how to round up to the nearest £10 (or € or $). This is very easy to do, but first, a quick re-cap on the ROUNDUP (or ROUNDDOWN or ROUND) function…

The ROUND group of functions works like this: =ROUND(cell_ref, no_of_decimals), so =ROUND(A1, 2) would round the value in cell A1 to 2 decimal places, and ROUNDUP(B2, 0) would round upwards to the nearest whole number. Easy, huh?

To round to the nearest 10, we use the same format, but move into negative numbers for the second part of the formula, so =ROUND(C3, -1) would round the value in cell C3 to the nearest 10.

So there you go, a quick look at more advanced use of the ROUND group of functions.

By Neil Shorney

Did you know, we now offer live e-learning courses for all levels of Excel - visit http://www.nsales.co.uk/microsoft_excel_training for more info.

A keyboard short-cut to open “Format Cells”

By Neil Shorney, Director, Naturally Sales Ltd.
 

Most of us use the “Format Cells” dialogue on an almost daily basis – we reach it by right-clicking on the cell (or cells) we want to format and selecting it from the list.

I don’t know about you, but this always seems to me to take a little too long. Fear not, because there is a keyboard short-cut to take us straight to this dialogue: CTRL+1.

Picking data from a list

By Neil Shorney, Director, Naturally Sales Ltd.

This week, we have a time-saving tip to help with data entry.

Imagine you’re entering data into a spreadsheet and you have to enter something into a cell which you’ve already typed further up the worksheet. As you may know, if you start typing, Excel will try to guess what you want to write. However, if you have many values beginning with the same letters, you sometimes have to type quite a lot before Excel guesses correctly.

An alternative is to pick the data you want from a list of previously-entered values. You can do this by pressing Alt+Down (arrow). You can then select the value you want, either using the mouse or by using the arrow keys followed by enter. What’s nice about this is that it presents the values in alphabetical order, so it’s much easier to find what you need to.

A quick keyboard shortcut

By Neil Shorney, Director, Naturally Sales Ltd.


We have a short-and-sweet Excel tip for you this week. 

Have you discovered the keyboard shortcut to move between worksheets in a workbook?  
CTRL + Page Down moves to the right, CTRL + Page Up moves to the left!