Welcome to Week 4, and welcome, Prashan. >> Thank you, Nicky.

>> So this week,

we're going to be
creating some great summary reports from large quantities of data,
why is this important? >> As you mentioned, Nicky, in business, we're often working
with
these large data sets. >> Yeah. >> So it's sometimes very difficult
to find out what the data is trying to tell us. To extract some meaning from the
data,
we need to create these summary reports, as well as some great visual tools. >> You
talk about large data sets,
and this is the problem. Where do we even begin with these sets? >> Exactly, where
do we begin? Well, one great place to start is by using
Excel's functions COUNTIFS and SUMIFS. COUNTIFS counts the number of
times a certain criteria is met. SUMIFS sums a range based
on a certain criteria. >> Excellent, but
before we get stuck into these tools, a lot of our learners might be more
familiar with the older COUNTIF and SUMIF. Would you mind just clarifying what
the difference is between them? >> Great point,
I should have emphasized the S better. COUNTIFS, and SUMIFS, with the S at
the end, was added in 2007 by Excel. These are more powerful versions of
the function because it can take up to 127 criteria. Prior to that, COUNTIF, SUMIF,
without
the S, could just take a single criteria. >> And we're going to encourage our
learners to rather use the newer versions of these functions. >> Exactly. >> Now,
we're going to also be looking
at something else while we look at these functions, and
that is mixed cell references. And for a lot of learners,
this might be new as well. Would you mind just explaining what
the mixed cell references are? >> Sure thing, Nicky. In the Essentials course, we
talked about absolute cell references
versus relative cell references. In absolute cell references,
we lock the column and we lock the row. Mixed cell references
are somewhere in between. We can lock the column, but not the row. Or we can lock
the row,
but not the column. Hence the term mixed cell references,
somewhere in between absolute and relative. >> Fantastic, thanks, Prashan. Now, for
those people who haven't come
across these mixed cell references, we do have some additional
material in the toolbox this week. And I strongly encourage
you to check it out. because it does take a little bit of time
to get your head around these mixed cell references. So Prashan, the other thing
we're going to
be looking at this week is sparklines. Can you just tell us what a sparkline is? >>
Sparklines, funky name for
a great new tool in Excel. Sparklines are mini-charts
that fit in a single cell. And we can create lots of sparklines
in a few clicks in Excel now. >> Brilliant, now,
we're talking about charting. We did look at creating charts
in the Essentials course. >> We did. >> But they're all very clean,
and all very neat. And I have to be honest,
that's not always my experience. I've come to create charts, and what
should be labels ends up being a chart series, and I get these flat lines, help. >>
The famous flat line
problem with charting, that always happens to me as well. Which is why we're going
to cover some
advanced charting techniques this week. We're going to master
the Select Data dialog box. And then we're going to work
with dual axes as well. And something great is, we're going to
add some trend lines to our chart. So we can use our data and
our chart for forecasting purposes. >> So it's going to be
a real action packed week. >> Very much so. >> Right, so next up you're going to
be looking at our practice videos. Can I remind you to download
the workbooks and work along with us? Because it's like driving a car. It's easy to
watch somebody else do it,
but we need you [LAUGH] to get into the driving seat and
make sure you can do it yourselves. Also don't forget to
check out the toolbox. And now it's over to you. [SOUND]