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Excel Data Management: Practical Manipulation and Transformation Techniques

Most Technology Training classes will be delivered online until further notice.

Before each sesson, Tech Training will provide a Zoom link for live online classes, along with any required class materials.
 



Do you struggle with long lists of Excel data? This class is your relief. Enroll to finally learn how to quickly and easily fix and transform your data, to prepare it for analysis. Discover powerful fast ways to solve the peskiest data problems in Excel.

 


 

Abstract

When you struggle to transform a long Excel dataset, you want to be as efficient as humanly possible. Because even a few great tips that you can learn can immediately make a huge difference in your productivity and save literally hours of time that you currently waste.

Fortunately, Excel has an amazing power to help you speed things up. If you know how, you can fix most problems, manipulate and transform your data in Excel faster than you ever dreamed possible.

That’s exactly what you’ll learn in this one-day class.

Its goal is to help you quickly acquire a solid collection of great tips and tricks. So that you finally feel that you can take a real advantage of Excel as an efficient data manipulation and transformation tool.
 

After this one-day class you'll be able to:

  • Import data into Excel the right way and prevent some problems from the get-go.
  • Quickly remove unwanted visible and invisible characters that mess up your data.
  • Efficiently replace characters or text strings to modify your data.
  • Fix case problems in your datasets.
  • Quickly transform your data with the remarkable, lighting-fast flash-fill feature.
  • Comfortably use any one of the two methods to concatenate data.
  • Creatively resurrect leading zeros that were lost on (incorrect) import.
  • Easily parse data -- extract precisely what you want from useless longer text strings.
  • Discover some little-known benefits of the Text-to-columns feature.
  • Fix some problems with dates in Excel - fast.
  • Create formulas that extract the year, the month, the day, the weekday, or the quarter from a date.
  • Create formulas that extract Stanford quarters from a list of dates.
  • Quickly and efficiently fill the blank cells with the values from the cells above (hugely important for pivot tables).
  • Round numbers (A real must know how - if you work in finance).
  • Quickly filter and query data to find what's important.
  • Extract the data you want from a larger dataset.
  • Append data details with VLOOKUP.
  • Discover the benefits of using Excel Tables.

 

Prerequisites:

Basic Excel experience

Igor Ovchinnikov

Igor Ovchinnikov has been teaching software productivity classes for over 20 years. Stanford staff have enjoyed his training since around 2007. His training philosophy stems from a strong belief that learning is a perpetual cycle of new discoveries and improvement.

Custom training workshops are available for this program

Technology training sessions structured around individual or group learning objectives. Learn more about custom training


University IT Technology Training sessions are available to a wide range of participants, including Stanford University staff, faculty, students, and employees of Stanford Hospitals & Clinics, such as Stanford Health Care, Stanford Health Care Tri-Valley, Stanford Medicine Partners, and Stanford Medicine Children's Health.

Additionally, some of these programs are open to interested individuals not affiliated with Stanford, allowing for broader community engagement and learning opportunities.