Wednesday, July 3, 2013

Why You Should Use Subtotals


Quick and Easy. Always a good thing. Using Excel’s built-in Subtotal feature can save you an enormous amount of time and give you a remarkably easy way to Organize Your Data with practically no effort. Here are 3 Reasons Why you should put Subtotals in your Excel tool belt:

1. Versatility: As you would expect, Subtotals are able to summarize your data by SUM. Additionally, however, your data can also be reviewed by Count, Average, Max, Standard Deviation, and others.

2. Dynamic: With the ready access to controlling what type of data and which field at your fingertips, you have the ability to slice and dice your information on the fly (Good Stuff!).

3. Sharable: Often what an analyst or manager wants is a “Quick and Dirty” way of reviewing their data in a logical manner. Moreover, however, it is typically desirable to share the Information (“Information” is clearly superior to mere “Data”) with others. Subtotals are a sharp, concise way of doing exactly that!

As with so many marvelous tools in Excel, Subtotals are far too often misunderstood, ignored, or simply not thought of. Give it a try, but here’s an Important Tip: Since you need to initially sort your data according to what you wish to summarize, it might be a good idea to save it to a Practice File before trying this out for the first time.

Subtotals. Another example of Excel Gold.

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