The Ultimate Cheat Sheet To Solve 90% of Business Questions Using Only 5 Excel Tricks

Quick answers to business problems

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You’re a data analyst. It’s 9:03 AM, and your inbox is already flooded with requests.

“Can you pull the sales numbers for last quarter?”, “What’s the revenue by region for this month?”,“How do we compare to last year?” The usual.

You grab your coffee and fire up Excel, ready to dive into the data.

But today’s different. You know that with just five simple tricks, you can solve 90% of these questions in minutes.

In this post, I’ll share the 5 Excel tricks I’ve personally used the most throughout my 5 years as a data analyst.

Let’s check them out.

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1) Quick Business Snapshot

👔Business, non-data driven question: “What’s going on in my business?”

📊How to translate it into numbers to give a quick summary snapshot:

1. Break down the key metric (e.g: sales) by key regions, categories, or attributes.

2. Pick the relevant time period (e.g., the past year).

3. Check the overall sales performance in absolute numbers.

4. Determine the sales share for each category.

⬇️Here is how to do this in Excel using only Pivot Tables

💡Excel Shortcut: Use “Alt +N +V+T” to create a pivot table quickly

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2) Year-Over-Year Trends

👔Business, non-data driven question: “How are we doing YoY?”

📊How to translate it into numbers to check YoY trends:

1. Gather Historical Data

2. Check the increase/decrease year over year (break it down further if needed)

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3) Recent Trends

👔Business, non-data driven question: “Any concerning trends?”

📊How to translate it into numbers to check recent trend evolutions

1. Choose a relevant time period (e.g: the last year, last quarter, last month/week)

2. Break down the sales data daily (and by any relevant category)

3. Use a line chart to quickly visualize recent trends

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4) Calculate new metrics

👔Business question: “What’s the price of each item?”

📊To answer this with our current dataset we will need to add a new calculated field

1. Select “Calculated Field”

2. Calculate the new metric using the available data (e.g: Price per item = Sales/quantity)

3. Analyze the new metric in the pivot table

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5) Answer Specific Questions using AI

👔Business question: “What’s the product with the highest total sales for December 2024?”

📊You can ask AI to give you a super quick answer:

1. Select “Analyze Data”

2. Formulate a clear and precise question in the search bar

3. Get the answer

Did you find this useful? Don’t be a stranger, drop a comment and let me know :)

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