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10 Excel Formulas Every Data Analyst Should Know

The document outlines ten essential Excel formulas for data analysis, including CONCATENATE, VLOOKUP, LEN, and SUMIFS, each with a brief description of their functions and applications. It emphasizes the importance of these formulas in manipulating and analyzing data effectively. The document concludes by highlighting Excel's popularity for small data analysis and encourages further exploration of its capabilities.

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Deepa S
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57 views7 pages

10 Excel Formulas Every Data Analyst Should Know

The document outlines ten essential Excel formulas for data analysis, including CONCATENATE, VLOOKUP, LEN, and SUMIFS, each with a brief description of their functions and applications. It emphasizes the importance of these formulas in manipulating and analyzing data effectively. The document concludes by highlighting Excel's popularity for small data analysis and encourages further exploration of its capabilities.

Uploaded by

Deepa S
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Contents

1. CONCATENATE
2. VLOOKUP
3. LEN
4. SUMIFS
5. DAYS/NETWORKDAYS
6. SUBSTITUTE
7. MINIFS/MAXIFS
8. TRIM
9. COUNTIFS
10. LEFT/RIGHT

1. CONCATENATE

Let’s start with a straightforward one. Concatenate allows you to combine the
values of several cells into one. It’s one of the most powerful formulas for
conducting data analysis, and is commonly used to combine text, dates and
numbers. Combining the components of a URL, or the lines of an address, are
two typical examples of what the formula is used for. You’ll find a complete
step-by-step CONCATENATE tutorial here.

2. VLOOKUP

You’ve no doubt come across =VLOOKUP, which will be familiar to anyone


who’s used Excel. The formula allows you to look up data that is arranged in
vertical columns. For example, if you have a list of months of the year with the
profit made in each month, =VLOOKUP can present the data from the month
of your choice. You’ll find a step-by-step guide to the VLOOKUP function
here, and it’s also worth checking out the XLOOKUP function, too.

3. LEN
LEN is used in data analysis to display the number of characters in any given
cell. It’s often used when creating texts with character limits, or when trying to
identify the difference between product numbers. In the above example, Len
is used to count the number of characters in the names.

4. SUMIFS

The =SUMIF function is an essential formula in the world of data analytics.


The formula adds up the values in cells which meet a selected number. In the
above example, the formula is adding up the numbers in cells that are higher
than the number 5. You’ll find a comprehensive SUMIF tutorial here.

5. DAYS/NETWORKDAYS

This one is fairly self explanatory. =DAYS determines the number of days
between two calendar dates, and is commonly used to determine product life
cycles or contract periods. =NETWORKDAYS is its more useful counterpart,
and is used to calculate the number of working days between two dates. You
could say this formula lives for the weekend.

6. SUBSTITUTE

This is a useful trick that is ideal for updating cells in bulks. It’s another one
that does exactly what it says, and is extremely useful for updating URLs,
removing unintentional spaces or spelling errors. In the example above, the
formula is replacing the letter ‘t’ with ‘b’.

7. MINIFS/MAXIFS

This handy formula identifies which value is the lowest and which is the
highest. But it does more than just that, it also sorts values in relation to a
particular criteria too. For example, you can use it to sort the oldest and
youngest ages from a sample of men and women, displaying the values by
gender. In the above example, the MINIFS formula is returning 88, because
that’s the lowest number that meets the criteria.

8. TRIM
Using =TRIM allows you to remove unwanted spaces or characters from text.
In order for analysts to work with data, often you must clean up the data
before use. =TRIM is one of the many useful formulas that cleans up data
before analysis. The example above shows how an unwanted space was
removed at the end of a name.

9. COUNTIFS
THE COUNTIFS formula counts the numbers how many times a value
appears based on one criteria. In the example above, ‘Red’ and ‘England’
appear twice together, and that number is returned in the COUNTIFS cell.
You’ll find a step-by-step COUNTIFS tutorial here.

10. LEFT/RIGHT

The =LEFT and =RIGHT formulas are simple ways of getting data out of static
cells. =LEFT returns the desired number of characters from the beginning of
the cell, while =RIGHT does the opposite. Need to extract the area codes from
a list of phone numbers? This is the formula for you.

Final thoughts
There are many analysis tools available within specific programming
languages, but Excel is a popular choice when analyzing relatively small
amounts of data. The ten formulas we’ve covered represent the tip of the
iceberg in terms of what you can do with Excel, but they give you a taste of
the kind of powers you can yield as a data analyst.

Related watching: CareerFoundry’s own senior data scientist, Tom, goes


through some of the most important functions. After reading this article, you
might even recognize some of them!

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