Nothing happens in a vacuum. It is a near certainty that you collaborate with numerous people in different roles fairly regularly. And it's likely that some of those people contribute to or review your work in a variety of capacities. As such, it's essential that you are able to collaborate with colleagues, provide and receive feedback on workbooks, and ensure that everyone's input is reflected in the final version of your documents. Unfortunately, the more you share and collaborate with others, especially when they have differing levels of authority or clearance, the more you need to ensure your critical organizational data is protected. But, how do you balance the need to share with the need to keep a wrap on your sensitive information? Fortunately, Microsoft® Excel® includes several features and capabilities that enable you to navigate the fine balance between collaboration and security. Understanding how these features and capabilities work and how they work together will help you balance these concerns, keep your important work on track, and provide you with the peace of mind that comes with knowing your information is secure.

Working with large workbooks presents a number of challenges. Entering large amounts of data can be time consuming and prone to errors. You may also find yourself spending a lot of time and effort performing the same few tasks over and over again. And, the more people who work in the same workbook, the more these types of issues become magnified. In short, as you develop ever-larger and more complex workbooks, you'll want to find ways to automate tasks to save time, reduce errors, and generally make using your workbooks easier. The good news is that Microsoft® Excel® includes a variety of features that enable you to do just that. From ensuring that only the correct data or type of data can be entered into your worksheets, to performing repetitive tasks so you don't have to, Excel's automation features can save you valuable time and keep your data intact.

The formulas and functions within Microsoft® Excel® provide you with a robust set of options for performing complex calculations on the data in your workbooks. But on their own, they may not always perform the precise calculations you need them to. For example, you may need a function to reference a value from another dataset based on some particular criteria. But, how do you tell the function how to look that up? Or perhaps you need one of your arguments to be the result of another formula or function. As your workbooks become larger and more complex, errors can crop up, and searching for the cause of errors or unexpected results and troubleshooting your formulas and functions can become a nightmare. Fortunately, Excel provides numerous options for dealing with these, and many other situations. But doing so requires an understanding of a new set of Excel functions, Lookup functions, and a deeper understanding of function syntax. By investing the time it takes to elevate your understanding of how these functions work and how they work together, you'll begin to develop the ability to create incredibly complex functions and formulas that can perform any type of calculations. In addition, you will be able to audit your workbook content to find, troubleshoot, and correct different errors. Developing the skills you need to perform these audits can save you tremendous amounts of time, effort, and frustration when errors arise and will give you the peace of mind that comes with knowing you can trust your data and analysis.

By now, you're likely well acquainted with creating, building, and maintaining Microsoft® Excel® workbooks and performing all manner of data analysis. When you have all of the data you need and that data is in the correct format, there are practically limitless questions you can use Excel to answer. This is all fine and good when you have a specific question in mind and you're looking for one specific answer. But, what if you want to know how things will change if any number of variables themselves change? After all, you can never know for sure just how things will play out in the future. You could simply keep re-entering your data with different values, or you could make numerous copies of your data and update values as needed. But this all takes a lot of time and uses a lot of worksheet real estate to accomplish. And, you'll be saving ever-larger workbook files in the process. In short, if you need to crunch your numbers with a variety of different values to anticipate a variety of possible scenarios, you'll want some sort of automated way to do so. The good news is that Excel contains a robust variety of functionality that is designed to help with such tasks. Becoming familiar with how these different features work and what they can do to help you analyze your data will open whole new worlds of possibilities in terms of data analysis. This can help you with planning, using past data to attempt to predict future data, scheduling, or any number of other tasks that require you to consider the very real possibility that a variety of different outcomes is possible given the unpredictable nature of today's market.

Often, images can tell a story or provide insight in an instantaneous fashion that isn't always possible with words and numbers. When you're presenting complex relationships among various bits of data to large groups of people, you may find it easier to display a chart or a map instead of asking the audience to pore over massive amounts of data to see your point. Fortunately, Microsoft® Excel®'s capabilities for graphically presenting data go well beyond the use of simple chart types and include mapping data and sparklines. Investing a bit of time now to fully understand what these capabilities are and what they can do will give you the ability to make visual sense of your complex data for nearly any type of presentation or delivery situation.

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