Learn the basic math functions, then vlookup and pivot tables. The function wizard is your friend. Most importantly is knowing WHY you need to use vlookup or to use a pivot table.
Many good suggestions already been mentioned.
I’ll add one.
Link your Excel table to a Word doc. For example, my office sends out letters to employees with raises. The Excel table has ID, Name, dept, base salary, percent raise, and a calculated new salary.
The Word doc offers congratulations and links the table. Name, and the other information is filled in automatically. Execute a mail merge and our staff member has a stack of sorted letters ready to distribute to the departments.
She keeps the spreadsheet regularly updated and runs the mail merge just before each payroll.
I set up the spreadsheet several years ago. She created the Word Doc and I added the linked fields.
Stealing dis.
Creating interdocument huperlinks will work until the first time somebody moves the files, or you get a new update to Office that changes the linking format and breaks functionality. Linking files isn’t quite as bad as embedding documents (“Why is my two page Word file 35 Mb?”) but in the canonical list of computer sins it is up there.
However, what you describe is not linking but using the “Mail Merge” feature. This is an actually useful feature for doing mass mailings or otherwise populating a boilerplate document from a table. Nowever, that feature long predates Word and Microsoft, going back to at least WordStar and WordPerfect when it was still on CP/M.
Stranger
I hate any organization that is using Excel as a project management system in place of an actual project management system (I hate Project, but its a zillion times better than Excel spreadsheets).
I use exel for a log of my art work. No math. It has 7 or 8 columns of data.
At least one thing happens that has no explanation. I need to enter times from 0:0:0 all the way up to say 1:36:45 or something. The program kind of knows it, but if you do anything else besides enter the thing exactly once, it will not like the time format and leave off the seconds: 1:30. You can’t fix that in my experience. You need to make a new record. Why would this happen on a computer program?
Anyway I have also had a lot of trouble with the fact that in previous decades of computer use the menus are top down, heirarchical drop down choices, a la windows.
Guess what? They don’t like how easy that was…or something. Look up at exel: Is that clear? It looks like a disaster to me. It is a real hindrance to work. I especially hate the “Here we go again” feeling when you choose say print and you lose your visual contact with your file. This bugs the living hell out of me. I really thought Windows was a technological advance just for the ease of menus. Turns out they were just getting me hooked and there was another twist.
You need to go into cell format, select “More Number Formats”, select Time in in category, and select the “HH:MM:SS” type, then apply that formatting to all cells where you are entering time. This may vary from version to version in Office but it is certainly possible to set the formatting to display time in this way, and indeed to create arbitrary custom formats.
Stranger