A recent update to Excel allows you to set the default PivotTable layout.

Now, when you're building complex reports or performing one-off analyses, you can quickly get started with your favorite PivotTable layout. This feature is available for Excel 2016 on Windows as part of an Office 365 subscription.

The performance of OLAP PivotTables has also been improved.

In Excel (2013 or above version), whenever you select some data from a range of cells you get a small icon on the bottom right hand corner - it is called QUICK ANALYSIS.

I want to inspire you to use this tool, and for this I have listed 5+1 amazing things which you can do with the quick analysis option and which will save you a lot of time!

Some of the tasks that you can accomplish with the Quick Analysis tool are:

• Add running total.
• Create a Pivot Table.
• Recommended charts.
• Percentage share.
• Insert a sparkline.
• Highlight greater than values.

PivotTables in Excel are pretty awesome. In just a few clicks, you can build a detailed report that gives you quick and important insights into your data.

If you polish your PivotTables in the right way, your data and associated reports will be so much more valuable to your friends, colleagues or your manager.

In this post you'll get a wide range of tips to improve your PivotTables, including various shortcuts and hints that may have never heard about:

• Refresh your data source (to ensure your report is correct).
• Disable AutoFit Column Widths.
• Sort your data to answer the real questions.
• How should blank cells be presented?
• Change Subtotal options.
• Group dates together (by Week, Month, Quarter, Year…).
• Show values as a percentage or rank.
• Apply a Style to your PivotTable to align with your branding.
• Support your PivotTable with a PivotChart.
• Analyse relevant data in detail by double-clicking a cell.
• Add Slicers to enable quick filtering.

Excel has built-in tools that are very useful for troubleshooting formulas, even if the formulas are complex:

• Trace Precedents.
• Evaluate Formula.

The Evaluate Formula window and the tracer arrows are great tools that can be used to help you find the reason for an error.

You can give your worksheets form-like functionality without ever having to use VBA. In order to achieve this, you will have to use form controls.

Using formulas in combination with form controls, one can further extend the form control functionality and form-like appearance of the worksheet at hand.

This article uses a few simple examples to illustrate how to use form controls in Excel.

This article describes several alternative approaches to solving a lookup problem in Excel.

Specifically, the problem is: given an on-going list of invoices, create a lookup formula to find the product price based on the invoice date.

Also have a look at the article's comments, where readers propose additional solutions.

Data cleaning is one of the necessary excel skills that you are expected to possess today.

A data set might be having certain inconsistencies, and to make it more presentable and to help proper understanding of the data it is necessary to make the data look better and error-free.

This article describes 11 techniques to help you 'clean' data in Excel:

• Run a spell check.
• Make the text case consistent.
• Remove any extra spaces.
• Clear all formatting, comments, hyperlinks.
• Treat cells containing errors.
• Use 'Find and Replace' feature to make data look better.
• Replace or substitute text.
• Replace blank cells with '0', 'No Value', 'Nothing', 'Not Available', etc.
• Treat duplicates.
• Merging contents of columns.
• Splitting contents of a column.

The tutorial explains the basics of lookup in Excel, shows the strengths and weaknesses of each Excel lookup function and provides a number of examples to help you decide which lookup formula is best to be used in a particular situation.

The lookup functions discussed are:

• LOOKUP.
• VLOOKUP.
• HLOOKUP.
• VLOOKUP MATCH.
• HLOOKUP MATCH.
• OFFSET MATCH.
• OFFSET MATCH MATCH.
• INDEX MATCH.
• INDEX MATCH MATCH.