Tuesday's Tip: Pivot Tables made SUPER EASY!

I've trained thousands of people in Excel - all levels and I can tell you almost everyone is intimidated by Pivot Tables. Today's blog post has just 1 goal: if you use Excel - you need to know how to create a Pivot Table. It's so much easier than you think - so check it out.

First - When and Why should you use a Pivot Table?

Talking to people - I've learned one of the big reasons for users not learning or using Pivot Tables is they think they don't need them.  So here's the deal, if you use Excel even a little - you need to know how to create a Pivot Table. They are for everyone. sure, you can use them for really complex things - but most people will use them to create super simple summaries of data....daily. 

If someone sends me some data - often times - one of the first things I do is create a Pivot Table to see how much data I have, how diverse it is, how many categories of information etc. It helps me understand the high level summar...

Tuesday's Tip: 3 Easy Keyboard Shortcuts to Save Tons of Time

As a fellow Excel user AND someone who's trained hundreds of people in Excel - I can almost guarantee you don't know all these keyboard shortcuts and if you don't, you NEED to.

Shortcut 1: CTRL + [ARROW]

First let me clarify, the [arrow] can be any of the 4 arrow keys on your keyboard. Keep in mind that's a little different on everyone's keyboard. For example, my 4 arrow keys are in the lower right hand corner of my keyboard - I work on a Microsoft Surface.

So the Ctrl with the arrow key moves you in any direction to the next blank. For example, if I am in cell A1 and I have 5000 rows of data and row 5001 is blank and I use Ctrl+↓ that will bring me to cell A5001. It's SO FAST! It's such a great easy way to move around a large set of data. Most people think it moves you to the bottom of the data set - but that's only true if there's no blanks in the data.

Keep in mind, this can be done in any direction using any of the ...

Hey! I'm super excited to start this journey of a blog with Microsoft Office tips. It's something I've been wanting to do for YEARS and today is the day! Here we go!

My goal is to provide you with FREE, practical, awesome tips to better user your Office apps - Excel, Word, OneNote, Outlook, PowerPoint - you get the idea.

Tip #1 - Excel Tip: Using the New Flash Fill

This tip is included in my FREE mini-course:

3 Excel Secrets to Super Charge your Excel Skills. If you haven't taken it yet - you can get it for free here.

It's such an awesome tip - it allows you to quickly and automatically fill values. It's hard to explain without seeing an example.

So the idea is - Excel tries to find the pattern to what you're doing, more specifically, what you're extracting or adding to the text.

I've documented one example below - but watch the video for another example and to see exactly how it works.

Example 1 - 

You've got a list of part numbers with similar formatting. 

You may want to...