How to use Ideas in Excel
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Key notes
- Ideas in Excel helps you to understand your data through natural language queries that allow you to ask questions about your data without writing formulas that are, pretty complicated.
- You are able to ask complicated information like data questions with formulas, charts, or pivot tables in a very easy and common way.
- Excel is a massive productivity tool. Read more about it from our Microsoft Excel section.
- If you want to become an Excel master, you can go and read the Excel Guides Hub.
Ideas in Excel helps you to understand your data through natural language queries that allow you to ask questions about your data without writing formulas that are, pretty complicated. Ideas also analyzes and provides high-level visual summaries, trends, and patterns.
How can I use Ideas for Excel?
Excel has a pretty high learning curve because anybody can master its basic features pretty fast. Things get a little bit tricky when you get to formulas, right? And you have to become a little Excel master to know them by heart.
In the Ideas tool, you can use Natural Language Queries which is self-explanatory. You are able to ask complicated information like data questions with formulas, charts, or pivot tables in a very easy and common way.
To put it even more lightly, it’s like the Google search in Office.
Using the Ideas in Excel
Microsoft developers explain the exact process in the release notes:
Simply click a cell in a data range, and then click the Ideas button. Enter a question in the query box at the top of the pane, and press Enter. Ideas will provide answers that you can insert into the workbook in the form of charts, tables, PivotTables, and formulas answers.
Try the suggested questions
If you click the text box at the top of the Ideas windows, you will see a list of suggestions based on your data.
You can ask your own question
You can also write a specific question about your data.
You can save time and narrow down your Ideas by selecting only the fields you want to see. When you choose fields and how to summarize them, Ideas analyze just that data – speeding up the process and presenting fewer, more targeted suggestions.
In this example, you might only want to see the sum of sales by year. Or you can ask Ideas to display average sales by year. It’s very simple to do that:
1. Click on Which fields interest you the most?
2. Select the fields and how to summarize their data.
3. Ideas now offers fewer, more focused suggestions.
We hope that this little guide will help you understand how to use Ideas in Excel.
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