Previewing with Quick Analysis

This next new feature in Excel 2013 might be my personal favorite. I think you'll like it too, it's called Quick Analysis. It allow us to highlight or select data and quickly analyze it using a number of different options that we're going to explore right now as we continue to work with our No Obstacle Sport - July 2012 Sales Report. I'm just going to scroll down a little bit so we can see all of the sales for the first day in July. They go from row seven all the way down to row 16. Now, let's say we want to analyze over here in the Price column, our sales for that day.

We'll click and drag from cell E7 all the way down to E16 and we've highlighted all of our sales for that day. Now, you'll notice something appears in the bottom right-hand corner. It's our Quick Analysis icon, Ctrl+Q is the keyboard shortcut to get all of the options available. Just click it though and you'll see there are a number of different categories including Formatting, Charts, Totals, Tables and Sparklines. So let's start with Formatting. Under the Formatting heading, which is selected by default, we have Data Bars. Now, we don't need to click these. We can preview them before selecting them.

So, just hover over Data Bars and you'll see the actual bars appear in each of the cells. The bars that go from left all the way over to the right are our highest prices. Our lowest prices are the smallest bars. So, it's a quick way to get a feel for how many high-priced items we sold versus low-priced. Or we could use a color scale. In this case, the green items are our highest prices and you can see the red items are the lowest. It looks a little more red than green, probably not ideal for our company. Let's go to Icon Set, just another way using arrows.

We have Greater Than, Top 10%, with only 10 rows highlighted, only one is showing up in the top 10 and that's our $112.99 priced item. And if we don't like anything we've selected, we can use the Clear Format. We'll keep that in mind later on when we actually make a selection. Right now we're not going to select anything. We're going to go to Charts. This is another way to analyze data. For example, if we hover over Clustered Column, a chart appears over top of our data and this would be created for us if we selected it. It gives us a good idea of the items.

As you can see, we have 10 of them and it looks like item three and nine are highest priced. We can see that horizontally using Clustered Bar. There are Line Charts, Scatter and if we wanted to access some of the many more charts we have in Excel 2013, we could go to More Charts. Let's go to Totals now. Totals allow us to do some neat things like Sum for example. What you're going to see in the next cell down below is the total, the sum total for our selected cells which is $446.23. How about the Average? The Average price of our items that we sold on the first day of July, $4,462.

Account, we're going to see 10. That's the number of items. You can see % Totals, Running Totals; it all depends on the type of data you're looking at. Over here we can have those items show up off to the right. So, we have Sum, Average, Count, etcetera, but you'll see a yellow column off to the right where we can show those totals. And one that I like the most is actually hidden. Let's click the arrow and go to Running Total. Just hover over that one and you can see it's actually totalling up our items reaching the very last one at $446.23. So, you can experiment with some of those, Tables as well.

When we go to Tables, give that a click. We could have a PivotTable if we wanted to and there are different ways to view data in PivotTable. So, there are many more options to choose from by clicking More. If you're comfortable with PivotTables, you can experiment in that area. Sparklines as well, so when we go down to Line for example, Column, and Win/Loss, you can see for this particular type of data, Sparklines are not very useful; but keep in mind, Quick Analysis works on all kinds of data. So, depending on the actual content in your spreadsheet, Sparklines might be a good option.

Let's go back to Formatting though. Let's go down to the Icon Set and give it a click. Now, that locks it in and you can see when we click anywhere off to the right here, we have those little icons showing up for our first day of July. Maybe we don't like that one. We selected the wrong one. We want to go back, no problem. Just reselect those cells. Again the Quick Analysis icon appears. Give it a click and if you want Clear Format, go back to the icon, choose something different. I like this Color Scale, I'm going to select it, and deselect by clicking off to the right.

So that's called Quick Analysis. It's new in Excel 2013 and it's a great way to get a quick look at some of the data you may have highlighted, analyzing it using formatting, tables, graphs and charts; all kinds of cool options here in the Quick Analysis tool in Excel 2013.