This tip sheet brings together practical Microsoft Excel keyboard shortcuts for both Windows and Mac users to help speed up navigation, formatting, formulas, PivotTables, filtering, and more. Whether you’re cleaning data, analyzing survey results, or building reports, it’s a handy resource to keep beside you while you work.

Pivot tables often feel harder than they should, not because they’re complex, but because they’re rarely explained in a way that matches how we actually think about data. This article breaks down the most common frustrations and reframes pivot tables as a simple tool for answering clear questions. If you’ve avoided them or felt stuck, this will help you understand what they’re really doing—and how to use them with more confidence.

In this article, we'll show you an easy way to align y-axis labels in Excel charts and Microsoft applications. It's a simple but important step to make sure your data visualizations are clear and accurate.

While traditional bar charts are both straightforward and powerful for data representation, there are instances when we seek innovative alternatives to breathe new life into our reports. Enter the lollipop chart. Learn how to develop them in Excel here.

Want visuals that best express your data story? Here are some ideas to clean up those charts and help make them pop.

This article walks you step-by-step through the process we use when merging datasets from multiple sources.

Chart templates will alleviate the pains of trying to reformat every new chart from scratch. From adjusting text size and font to formatting bar width and colour, a template will save you a significant amount of time in drafting your next evaluation report.

Here, I share solutions to two challenges you are likely to come across while entering survey data: 1) coding complex question types and 2) dealing with unclear responses. Addressing these challenges will require some advanced coding that I did not cover in my first article.

When entering survey data, it is important that it is accurate, easy to analyze, and fast. Use these tips to prevent mistakes from the beginning.

The most exciting part about conducting a survey is seeing the results – finally your hard work has come to fruition, and you get to hear what everybody had to say! But before you can get to that step, you need to transform the stack of paper surveys on your desk into useable data.

In this article, I share my three-step system for making survey data entry as easy and painless as possible, which comes from my experience designing, entering, and analyzing survey data.