Make Better Decisions With Microsoft Excel 2010‏

When trying to track how much money your business has spent on a project in the past year, sometimes a large graph isn’t the best way to see the big picture. Sparklines—miniature charts that fit into a single Excel cell—can help you see individual trends quickly and make better decisions.

Set off your figures with Sparklines:

1.	On the Insert tab on the Ribbon, locate the Sparklines group.
2.	Select the type of Sparklines you want to insert, such as Line, Column, or Win/Loss.
3.	In the Create Sparklines dialog box, define your Data Range and Location Range, and then click OK.

To discover more great ways to use Sparklines, see Getting Started: Use Sparklines to Show Data Trends.

Draw attention to variances with Conditional Formatting.
Conditional formatting lets you set rules for how Excel cells look, based upon the information the cell contains. For example, if a department is meeting its revenue quota, the result is highlighted in green; if they are over budget, it will automatically be highlighted in red. It’s easy to set up:

1.	Select the data you want to conditionally format.
2.	On the Home tab, in the Styles group, click the arrow next to Conditional Formatting, and then click Color Scales.
3.	Click Manage Rules to manually set your rules and formatting options.

To find out more about applying Conditional Formatting, check out the Quick Start Guide.

Analyze massive amounts of data in a flash with PowerPivot.
PowerPivot, an add-in for Excel 2010, enables you to easily load and manipulate even the largest data sets from multiple sources. Download the add-in now.

1.	After installing the add-in, on the Ribbon select the PowerPivot tab and then click PowerPivot Window.
2.	Select the appropriate data source from the Get External Data box.
3.	Once you complete your analysis, you can get further insights by using Excel Pivot Tables under the View box.

Dig into your data with Slicers.
Slicers are the easy way to quickly filter data in a PivotTable report, without having to open drop-down lists to select the items that you want to filter. Here’s how:

1.	Select a PivotTable report.
2.	On the Options tab, in the Sort & Filter group, click Insert Slicer.
3.	In the Insert Slicers dialog box, select the PivotTable fields you want to add Slicer to, and click OK.
4.	In each Slicer, click the items on which you want to filter.