Summary of You Suck at Excel with Joel Spolsky

00:00:00 - 00:50:00

In the video, Joel Spolsky provides a tutorial on how to use Excel, covering topics such as rows and columns, formatting data, using paste values, ranges, and filling tables. He also demonstrates how to use pivot tables to summarize data.

• 00:00:00 Joel Spolsky explains how to Excel, starting with the basics of rows and columns. He goes on to demonstrate how to format data, and how to use paste values to easily transfer data between cells. He finishes the video by explaining how to use ranges and how to fill a table.
• 00:05:00 Joel Spolsky discusses the most common command you will use in Excel, control D, and how it can be useful for adding one more row or erasing undesired data. The video then goes on to explain how to use Excel's R1C1 reference style, which is more accurate and efficient when copying and pasting.
• 00:10:00 Joel Spolsky discusses how to work with Excel, explaining that the default mode is to have a relative reference. He provides a keyboard shortcut for switching between relative and absolute references.
• 00:15:00 In this video, Joel Spolsky explains how to enter data in an Excel spreadsheet using control enter. He also explains how to use the fill handle to fill in data in a more intuitive way.
• 00:20:00 Joel Spolsky provides a tutorial on how to fill in data in Excel using different methods. He shows how to use the canonical way of inserting a new column and filling it in, as well as a way to copy formats from another sheet and paste them into the current sheet. Finally, he explains how to select a range of cells in Excel and format them as desired.
• 00:25:00 Joel Spolsky demonstrates how to enter text into an Excel spreadsheet, how to autocomplete a column, and how to use a whole column in a formula. He then discusses how tax rates depend on location and how to create a tax table.
• 00:30:00 Joel Spolsky discusses the wrong ways to do calculations in Excel, including using vlookup and referring to entire tables. He then demonstrates how to use index and match to do the calculations more quickly and effectively.
• 00:35:00 Joel Spolsky demonstrates how to use Excel to calculate employee totals and salaries, as well as how to use Excel's auto filter feature to quickly see information about a specific group of employees.
• 00:40:00 In this video, Joel Spolsky demonstrates how to use Excel tables to calculate taxes and bonuses. He first removes the location and salary fields from a table, then creates a new table to hold the tax rates and text restrictions. He then looks up the tax rate for Berlin and fills in the values automatically. He shows how to give people bonuses in a search table column and explains how to format a cell using a percent sign, dollar sign, and four different text formats.
• 00:45:00 Joel Spolsky discusses the Excel features of goal seek and pivot tables, which are both powerful tools that can be used to help calculate and manipulate data. He warns against the common mistake of rounding aggressively, which can cause goals seek to not work correctly. He demonstrates an example of goal seek in action, and explains that the final result may not be exactly 16% because of rounding.
• 00:50:00 Joel Spolsky demonstrates how to create a pivot table in Excel, which can be used to summarize data in various ways.