Microsoft Excel Training for Individuals and Companies

Key Functions in Excel for HR professionals

Excel has repeatedly proven to be a very cost-effective and adaptable tool for managing HR activities in small organisations.

Excel is used by small businesses to manage timesheets, employee absences, payroll, and contractor relationships, among other things. It makes sense for a startup firm to maximise the use of Excel, especially if the company lacks the time or resources to investigate and purchase a recruitment software solution.

List of Key Excel tips for HR professionals:

• Filtering Data

The ability to filter down employee details in a personnel database is one of the most common HR responsibilities. Depending on your requirements, you may choose to sort personnel by start date, salary, or department.

• Filtering use cases include the following:
• Maintaining an employee attendance report to track attendance.
• Keeping tabs on staff by department
• Onboarding report for new workers
• Status of performance appraisal completion
• Filtering employees who earn a particular amount of money

• SUMIFS

The COUNTIF function counts if a condition is met, whereas the SUMIF method sums values if a condition is met.

• COUNTIFS

COUNTIFS allows you to easily slice your data and count the number of cells inside a given region that fulfil the specified criteria.

• TODAY

The TODAY function is a shortcut for saving time. It automatically updates by retrieving the current date and time from your computer. When you open or alter a worksheet, it immediately updates.

The function is useful for calculating things like age, service time, or any other period that does not have a defined end.

HR workers are frequently asked to compute date ranges using today’s date. Calculating an employee’s age and length of service in the company is an example of this in practise.

The TODAY function will automatically change itself so that you always have the current date in your formulas.

• DATEDIF

In Excel, the DATEDIF function returns the number of days, months, or years between two dates.

• NETWORKDAYS Function

NETWORKDAYS is a useful function for organising projects, scheduling, or calculating a span of workdays that includes holidays.

• Data Validation

Data validation enables you to explain the creation of a drop-down selection of cells. Employers frequently want employees to have hands-on experience with data validation, where users can drop range files containing accepted inputs for prepared cells. Applying correct data validation is a must-do job because every company has their own work styles and expects the work to be completed in their own version.

• VLOOKUP

This incredible feature is ideal for connecting and comparing different collections of data. Generally, this formula returns a value from the second table if a particular value from one table exists in the first section of another table. It can be used, for example, to see if new terms you want to use are already in an account, or to compare two distinct time frames.

VLOOKUP stands for vertical look-up, as in gazing down a column of data cells vertically. HLOOKUP, on the other hand, stands for horizontal look-up across a horizontal row.

• Pivot Tables

The majority of Excel users are unaware of the pivot tables feature’s capabilities. Once learnt, pivot tables are a fantastic tool that allows users to extract raw data and organise it in a tabular format. In the HR field, for example, it is normal practise to search through a table for employee names. Examining salary expense and personnel count for each department might be an easy use case for HR experts utilising pivot tables. PivotTables are also useful for quickly generating management hiring reports.

• Data Filtering

If you’re following along in an Excel worksheet, you’ve probably seen that your tables have filters applied to them automatically. When it comes to slicing and dicing data, filters are invaluable time savers. They can also come in handy when validating data in a table.

Let’s say you needed to follow up on some unfinished performance reviews. You have a report that shows the status of all your employees’ appraisals.

You might sort the worksheet by status and copy and paste the ones you need to follow up on, but selecting the status you want to follow makes it simple to apply a filter. In this case, we’re looking for all of the appraisals that haven’t been started yet.

• Table Formatting

Let’s talk about how to style employee tables before we start working with lookup formulae. This will ensure that your functions and processes are consistent.

A primary key should be present in every table. A column or set of columns is a unique identifier in structured query language (SQL). The primary key in Excel should be a single column that identifies each data row.

When working with employee data, the Employee ID is nearly always the key. VLOOKUP, INDEX, MATCH, and INDEX-MATCH functions are significantly easier to manage when they are placed in the first (left-most) column of any worksheet that lists individual employees.

We hope that this fast overview has whetted your appetite for data-driven decision-making. We encourage you to apply these human resource formulae and functions as you learn by doing. Finally, apply your insights to strengthen your HR strategy and guide and modify your day-to-day operations.