Excel 2016 Tips and Tricks

Lesson – Working with Tables

Excel 2016

U SING T ABLES

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Discussion

Excel’s special table features provide powerful ways to work with and analyze data. You can create multiple tables on the same worksheet and you can insert new columns or rows within a table without affecting other data in your worksheet.

When you define a range as a table, powerful filtering and sorting options are automatically added to the table, a large gallery of table formatting styles is available to make your table easy to read and a Table Tools contextual Design tab is added to the Ribbon .

Tables automatically expand if you type data in the row directly below the table. All table styles, conditional formatting, calculations and data validation rules that you have applied to table data are extended to the new row. Similarly, if you type data in the column directly to the right of the table, the new column is automatically included in the table and adopts the table style.

If you add a column to the table and enter a formula in a single cell in the column that references other data in the same row, the formula is automatically copied to all rows in the table.

Each table you create is automatically assigned a name. You can change the table name to something more descriptive, if desired. Table names let you create formulas that reference elements of the table by their column name instead of using cell addresses. This type of referencing ensures that formulas expand automatically when you add new data to the table.

NOTE In previous versions of Excel, tables were known as Lists or Databases . All the features previously associated with Lists or Databases are now incorporated into the new Tables feature.

C REATING A T ABLE FROM E XISTING D ATA  D ISCUSSION You can define an existing range of data as a table and then use Excel’s table features to work with, and analyze, the data.

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