In this session, you learnt about the basics of MS Excel.

You saw how excellent reports

can be made using Excel. Excel can be converted into a more presentable dataset with a
little effort. Let’s summarise the learnings from all the segments.

An Excel file is a workbook that has various spreadsheets made of rows and columns where you
can analyse and summarise tons of data, and each workbook can have multiple sheets for
different headers.

You also learnt about various functions available in the Home Tab, including the usage of copy
and paste functions. Font Style can also be changed by using the Home Tab.

You also learnt how to use Format painter in Excel. When it comes to copying formatting in Excel,
Format painter is one of the most helpful and underused features. It works by copying the
formatting of one cell and applying it to other cells.

With just a couple of clicks, it can help you reproduce most, if not all, of the formatting settings.

In this segment, you learnt that different text alignments are available to you in Excel. You also
learnt about text indentation, which can be used to change the start point of any text or data in
Excel.

You also learnt how to paste data while preserving the formatting and width of the original sheet.
Next, you learnt about the Merge & Centre option, which allows you to merge two or more cells
on the sheet. You were also advised to be cautious before merging cells that contain data, as it
can lead to loss of data in the merged cells.
The most common task people do in Excel is to search for useful data. For example, you may
want to find the cheapest hospital for chest pain treatments. Or, you may want to find the most
expensive healthcare treatments in a particular region of the country.

The sort and filter operations are meant to perform these types of analyses. Sorting means to
arrange the data (typically, a column) in increasing, decreasing or alphabetical order.

Filters, as the name suggests, enable you to filter out certain data, such as all the hospitals in
Alabama or all the hospitals treating chest pain.

Sort and filter are probably the most commonly used operations. In fact, filtering is so common
that we recommend you to memorise its shortcut: Ctrl/Cmd + Shift + L.

Some of the useful points to remember are as follows:

1. Sorting works only when the data is in the correct format.
2. Searching can be done using Ctrl + F or by filtering data.
3. Sorting can be done on numbers (increasing/decreasing) and characters (A-Z/Z-A).
4. Sorting works only when the data is in the correct format.

For a great report, it is important to get the numbers to the right decimal places, use colours to
highlight important rows, create borders, hide unimportant columns, etc. In this segment, you
learnt the basics of making a good report - hiding or deleting unimportant columns, freezing rows
or columns for better readability, etc. In the process, you also learnt ways to use shortcuts so that
you can save time.

Small things such as hiding irrelevant information and getting the right widths of columns. make a
huge difference in the readability of a report.

Formatting operations are aimed not only at improving readability but also at reducing the
amount of time spent on reading a file. Hiding columns, formatting numbers, using shortcuts, etc.,
are all ways to improve both readability and efficiency.
Number formatting is a way to obtain numbers in the right format. Getting numbers in the right
formats and units makes the analysis easier and reduces the chances of mistakes when reading
the data.

You learnt about the number command group, where you have various options, such as general
number, currency, accounting, short date, long date, time, percentage, fractions, scientific and
text. These options can be used to group numbers according to the need.

Borders
In a report containing hospital charges data from multiple states/regions, good readability means
that the reader can easily identify the various states and the subregions within them. You learnt
how to do that using borders. Borders will help demarcate different sections of the report.

It is also possible to create borders manually. This becomes helpful when you want to draw
borders only on certain cells that are staggered or do not fall in a pattern where the conventional
borders can be used.

Wrap Text
The Excel wrap text feature can help you fully display longer text in a cell without it overflowing to
other cells. ‘Wrapping text’ means displaying the cell contents on multiple lines rather than one
long line. This will allow you to avoid the ‘truncated column’ effect and make the text easier to
read and better fit for printing.

Some methods for text wrapping are as follows:

1. Go to the Home tab > Alignment group and click the Wrap Text button.
2. Press Ctrl + 1 to open the Format Cells dialog (or right-click the selected cells and then click
Format Cells…), switch to the Alignment tab, select the Wrap Text checkbox and click OK.

Conditional formatting is a highly effective way to highlight important information and trends in
the data. Using conditional formatting, you can highlight cells in certain colours and shades
depending on the cell's value.
Take a look at the set of numbers given in the following table. How many numbers greater than
90 are present in this table?
If you were to actually count that, apart from taking a lot of time, the task will probably bore
and/or irritate you. Now, take a look at the following formatted table and count the number of
cells above 90.

This will probably take you less than five to seven seconds. Apart from simple use cases like this,
conditional formatting is heavily used to highlight trends in numbers, dates of the current week in
specific colours, etc.
To apply multiple conditional formattings on the same data, you have to go to ‘manage rules’ and
then add a rule rather than creating a new rule (which will override the original one). You can
create gradients, use multiple colours (2-scale, 3-scale, etc.) and use conditions based on
numeric values, text, and so on.

In this segment, you learnt about the following types of functional information systems:
1. Sales and marketing information systems
2. Manufacturing and production information systems
3. Finance and accounting information systems
4. Human resources information systems

Security of data is usually of critical importance to most organisations. You often want that the
data should only be read but not edited without your permission or should be accessible to only
a few people. Passwords are used to do that.
You may have been irritated searching for files on your system that are not often used. Also, you
may have experienced the feeling 'I have no clue what this file contains' while staring at the icons
and names of a number of files. These silly issues occur often because we do not put enough
thought behind naming files.

Naming files becomes especially important at a larger scale when your file is likely to get lost
among a number of similar-looking ones. Also, we try to do make good reports to reduce the time
spent by the reader to understand a report or data. There is no point doing that if a person takes
an hour just to find a file.
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