Surgent's Excel for Accountants: Using Excel to Cleanse and Prepare Data

Overview

Do you ever import data into Excel, and then spend a bunch of time manually preparing it for use? Perhaps you delete extra columns or rows. Maybe you need to split a single column into multiple columns, or, combine multiple columns into a single column. The good news is that many of these transformations can be fully automated with Excel!

The Get & Transform tools built-in to Excel 2016 for Windows, formerly available as the Power Query add-in, are incredibly powerful. At a high level, they enable us to retrieve data from a variety of sources and prepare it for use as needed. In this session, we’ll use Get & Transform queries to help with several common tasks, including flattening data, splitting and combining columns, formatting data, unpivoting summarized data, and combining several csv exports.

If you frequently export/import data from one system to another, you will want to understand how to use a Get & Transform query to streamline your work.

Highlights

• Automation capabilities of Excel
• The “Get & Transform” Tool
• Using “Get & Transform” for flattening, splitting and combining data, unpivoting summarized data, and combining CSV exports

Prerequisites

Experience working with Excel

Designed For

Accounting professionals using Excel for Windows

Objectives

• Recall the steps to create a new query
• Identify commands that transform data
• State the process to return the transformed data to Excel

Preparation

None