Excel offers a lot of different tricks to create great informative charts and diagrams. A lot of the useful adjustments related to the axis. E.g., you can hide an axis, use primary and secondary axis, change the presentation of data on the axis, etc.

There are a lot of different pre-defined charts in Excel, but for some types of data, pre-defined charts such as area chart or line chart can look fine but are incorrect.

When you work with digits, it’s crucial how you round them. It doesn't depend on what exactly you are rounding - decimals, thousands, or millions. You can see very different amounts after summing the figures, rounded in different ways:

For the analysis of the investment portfolio, it is helpful to see the unrealized gain or loss. These amounts show how many you will receive or lose if you realize all available stocks right now. Sure, there are some fees for the operations that can decrease gain or increase loss, but, at least, you want to see the least approximate amounts:

There are countless reasons why you might need to have stock prices in your Excel spreadsheet. In the past, you had to copy and paste from Yahoo Finance or another financial service, but at the moment, Microsoft offers a new way to add and update some stock information such as stock prices, changes of price, etc.

Many financial and non-financial companies like Yahoo provide investments portfolio tracking services but do not offer the ability to change the appearance of the charts. Microsoft Excel gives you full flexibility by providing different types of customizable charts. E.g., there are a few variations of Area chart for tracking the value and costs of your portfolio.

One of the essential parts of any work with data is presenting results. You can use many different charts, diagrams in Microsoft Excel or PowerPoint.

A Gantt chart is one of the most popular tools in project management. It illustrates project schedules by showing activities, like tasks and events, against time.

When you analyze quiz answers, you need to see the numbers and the difference between all negative and positive answers. This is not easy, if you have more than 3 possible answers - positive, neutral and negative. However, you can create a chart that shows the whole picture:

When you work with data in Excel, often you need to add more and more of new data. However, it takes some time to update formulas, charts, tables, when you add new data. Excel proposes functions that can help to customize your data and avoid routine updating. This tip is about creating an automatically extended (also known as dynamically updated or just dynamic) drop-down lists.