10 Essential Excel Features For Data Analysts (and How to Use Them)

You cannot go wrong learning spreadsheets

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Spreadsheets are still in style

The use of electronic spreadsheets date back to 1979 and are still one of the most popular ways to review and manipulate data. Today, Microsoft’s ubiquitous spreadsheet program Excel has over 750 million users and is used in some of the largest companies worldwide. I personally use Excel almost every day because it can sometimes lead to quicker results than spinning up Python or loading the data into a database.

One of the reasons Excel is so popular is because it is jam-packed with features and functions that can be used to clean, aggregate, pivot, and graph data. In this article, we’ll go over the 10 features and functions for using data analysis in Excel I think every analyst needs to know:

1. Pivot tables and pivot charts
2. Conditional formatting
3. Remove duplicates