Learnings from Excel Skills For Business: Essentials by Macquarie University, Coursera Certificate

 

 

Eyes are a great gift of God to humankind. We should not subject them to unnecessary strain by looking at dirty data. Instead, we should focus on cleaning up any dirty data we may have.

I have recently finished Excel Skills For Business: Essentials by Macquarie University certificate course from Coursera. Best way to check your learnings is to implement them in real life.

This is the snapshot of a dataset, that I have taken from Kaggle. It represents the details of laptops of different companies with their prices, memory, GPU and operating systems.

Snapshot of uncleaned dataset

 

LEARNINGS 

• Use of Fill Handle

A plus sign is used as a fill handle; Excel's fill handle is a strong tool that lets you swiftly insert formulas or data into cells. It is shown as a little square in the selected cell or range's lower-right corner.

 

•   Adjusted Column Width

It helps in making the data more presentable and less of an eye sore.

• Use of Cell Styles

We use cell styles to quickly change the appearance of an excel sheet. It helps us in applying the same formatting to a group of cells quickly.

•   Insertion of a row

I have inserted a row for the heading, that will describe what the data is about. Whenever we are presenting the data or sharing excel sheet with someone it will help in better understanding.                    

          

• Use of merge and center

Merge and center is used to merge the selected cells and centralize the contents of first cell. 

• Use of Filter

Go to the Data tab and select filters. It helps us in sorting large datasets based on certain criteria.

 

How this filter option is useful?

Click on the dropdown symbol in each column header. Tick on the check box in front of 14. We can display only those laptops that have screen size of 14 inches.

NOTE- In our data we had some blank rows. First we will delete those rows, otherwise our filter won’t work properly. Following are the steps to highlight blank rows only.

Home > Editing group > Find and select > Go to special > Select Blanks

You will be able to see that all the blank rows are highlighted.

                  

             

Then delete the rows, a dialog box will appear.

Delete the entire blank row.

Yay! We have dealt with the blank rows.

Now your Filter will work and show all the 14 inches’ laptops.

• Using Functions in Excel

To find out the average price of 14 inches’ laptops I used AVERAGE function on the price column.

 

RESULTS

This is the cleaned dataset that we get after performing the above mentioned operations.