Microsoft Excel Training for Individuals and Companies

Essential Excel Skills that a Marketing Professional should have

Excel is a fantastic tool for a variety of marketing activities. The two most important applications I have for Excel are as a research tool and, maybe more obviously and fundamentally, for data analysis and reporting.

One of the most often questions I get is, “What Excel skills are most important for marketers to learn?” With that in mind, here are some essential tips to assist you, as a marketer, improve your Excel skills.

• VLOOKUP/HLOOKUP Function

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

MS Excel’s pivot tables are a very useful and effective tool. A pivot table categorises tabular data, making it easier to analyse vast datasets and identify relevant trends. Your data can be analysed, summarised, searched, and presented using them. Only when you can review and deduce relevant trends from data is it useful. Pivot Tables are specifically designed to assist you in doing so.

• Creating Charts

When marketing data must be presented graphically, I frequently see tables used to deliver it to important stakeholders. Even with large datasets that are difficult to define, conditional formatting can be used to add some visual signs to tabular data as a minimum. In any event, if you’re not working with a large dataset, you should look for any opportunity to visually represent your data.

• Conditional Formatting

It applies a given format to a range of cells and then modifies the formatting automatically based on the cell values.

For example, if you have sales data from various marketing campaigns such as TV, print ads, digital marketing, outdoor advertising, and so on, each channel will be assigned a different colour, and the value corresponding to that channel will automatically have its cell in that colour, without any manual formatting.

• COUNTIF and SUMIF

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

Another option for extracting specific data is to use the SUMIFS function. SUMIFS works in a similar way as COUNTIF, but instead of counting the data, it sums it up for you. You can use SUMIFS to define several conditions.