Top 10 Excel Operations Every Manager Should Know.

I am a firm believer in the maxim that "God helps them that helps themselves." This applies in spades to corporate managers.

A middle manager in banking, consulting, law and the like should have basic competence with a number of common applications including Project, OneNote, Word, and a data visualization tool like Tableau. A basic understanding of these tools will help you execute deliverables for senior management, set expectations for what your employees can accomplish, and allow you to more effectively issue spot your employees' work.

And don't forget Excel. Much maligned, Excel remains a stalwart and indispensable tool in corporate America.

I use Excel more than any other application except Outlook. I use it for lists, for budgeting, for brainstorming, for tracking employee attendance, for user inventory analysis and product usage, and much more.

Here are ten must-use operations in Excel every manager should know:

1. Remove Duplicates. When you have a list of, say, Employee IDs, quickly remove duplicates so you can perform subsequent calculations or analysis using a set of unique IDs. Time to Learn: 10 minutes.
2. Conditional Formatting. When you have a large set of data you want to analyse, Excel has some great basic visualization operations - no need to master Tableau! If you want to see all days in the year each employee handled more than 10 requests, conditional formatting will quickly highlight this for you. Time to Learn: 30 minutes.
3. Pivot Tables. These appear daunting, but they are worth spending some time getting fluent with pivot tables. You can quickly extract and run calculations on large datasets based on the facets you want to limit by. A must! Time to Learn: 2 hours.
4. Filtering. This is a super simple but powerful feature. Use filtering to hone in on specific values in a large data set. Save tons of time. Time to Learn: 15 minutes.
5. Annotation. If you're collaborating on a spreadsheet, take advantage of the opportunity to add comments to cells to help provide context to cell values. Time to Learn: 10 minutes.
6. Charting and Graphing. Don't worry about mastering Tableau - Excel has plenty of native charting capabilities that will make your analysis richer and more impactful. Time to Learn: 2 hours.
7. COUNTIF: I love COUNTIF. This function allows you to quickly tabulate how many times a string appears in a column of data. You'll find it useful to combine this with Remove Duplicates mentioned above. Time to Learn: 30 minutes.
8. SUMIF: The numeric cousin to COUNTIF. Quickly add up numbers for a given reference string. Ideal for summarizing totals from large sets of data. Time to Learn: 30 minutes.
9. VLOOKUP: Use this when you need to find things in a table or a range by row. Once you've started using VLOOKUP you won't know how you lived without it. Time to Learn: 1 hour.
10. Control + Z: This is your do-over. When whatever crazy formula you've created breaks or you have no idea how that one damn' cell got formatted that way, just Control + Z and start again. I use this more than any other operation in Excel! Time to Learn: 2 minutes.

I highly recommend managers become fluent in Excel. It's probably the best bang for your productivity buck. It's really the Swiss Army Knife of office productivity tools. When you have a spare moment, add another operation to your knowledge bank. You won't regret it!

- Kevan Huston