Organizing and presenting your data in a logical and coherent manner is just as important as working with functions to analyze that data. In this lesson, you will use Microsoft Excel to sort, filter, and subtotal data. These functions, in addition to the functions you have used so far, can help you organize your data for better analysis and presentation.

As you progress in learning about the features of Microsoft Excel, you see that many of its features build on the concepts and topics introduced in the previous lessons. You have already seen that data analysis is an integral part of what you can do with Excel. Manipulating raw data for analysis can be done in many ways, and each method has its merits. In this lesson, you will create tables to make reviewing data easier. In addition, you will format data in order to show highs, lows, or trends.

Microsoft® Excel® provides you with powerful features to help you organize and analyze your data. As you become more familiar with these features, you'll find you can ask Excel a vast array of questions and get the answers you need. However, not everyone who you report to or present data to will have the same comfort level or expertise when it comes to viewing worksheets. Viewing information in the form of ranges of data entries is simply not natural for many people. You may find yourself presenting information to large audiences on a regular basis. In these cases, you don't want people scanning lines of data on a worksheet when you're trying to present. You want to give them a simple, easy-to-digest view of relevant data so they can quickly understand what's really important. In short, you need a way to generate visual representations of your data. Excel includes some handy functionality that can convert your raw or analyzed data into visually clear, easy-to-interpret diagrams with just a few steps. Taking the time to understand how this functionality works will give you the ability to generate high-impact visuals to present to nearly any audience, nearly any time, almost instantly.

You've already seen the way Microsoft Excel works and how features such as sorting, filtering, and summary functions can help you drill down into your data to get answers to very specific questions. Although using these features is often a good option for attaining specific answers, these aren't necessarily the best options if you need to frequently change the questions you're asking of your data. To change the question you're asking when using functions, sorting, and filtering, you often need to rewrite functions, adjust criteria, or refilter your data; sometimes, you even need to use several of these methods at the same time. You certainly could take this route, but it isn't the most efficient way to re-query your data to get the variety of answers you need. If you work in a high-paced, data-intensive environment, you simply may not have the time needed to recalculate every time a supervisor asks you a different question. You need something a little more dynamic. Excel includes a powerful feature that enables you to ask any number of questions of your data; get detailed, specific answers; and do it all over again in just a matter of moments. By taking advantage of this functionality, you can get critical, time-sensitive organizational intelligence to the people who need it quickly, easily, and with a high level of flexibility.

You'll wrap things up and then validate what you've learned in this course by taking an assessment.