Excel Shortcuts From Lifehacker & Microsoft Excel Online

Hope your summer is off to a great start! Whether you just graduated from school or getting ready for your summer vacation, we hope you keep your Excel skills–and more broadly–your analytical skills up to speed. We discovered a really cool site called MBA Excel which shows a bunch of tips and tricks in Excel. The site is maintained by a UCLA Anderson MBA graduate so you know the tips are relevant for those of you in business school. Now, onto some recent news in the wonderful world of Excel!

8 Useful Shortcuts Worth Memorizing

8excelshortcutsApparently at the end of March, Lifehacker has something called “Microsoft Office Week” where they celebrate and post everything Microsoft-related. This post about the top 8 shortcuts in Excel is a nice tidy round up of things worth memorizing, but definitely not comprehensive.

If you don’t know any of the basic shortcuts yet, these 8 are definitely worth remembering. Some of our favorites include #1 Selecting everything with a single click, #3 Inserting the current date, and #7 Adding multiple rows and columns at once. Scroll down to the comments where you’ll see a bunch of other shortcuts Excel-geeks use all the time.

Source: Lifehacker

Microsoft Excel Online vs. Google Sheets

Microsoft Excel OnlineOne of our favorite debates: the advantages and disadvantages between Google Sheets and Microsoft Excel. We’ve written a long response on Quora about the pros and cons of both programs which has received a ton of feedback.

In response to Google Sheets, Microsoft released their own cloud-based version of Excel called Microsoft Excel Online. In this article by CloudPro, the writer gets into how the online version of Excel is obviously not as useful as the desktop version, but additional features like sharing and collaboration make Excel Online more similar to Google Sheets.

The main distinction between the two may come down to how many people have Google accounts (a lot) vs. those who have a Microsoft account (not as many). On mobile, for instance, Google Sheets has 2.9 million downloads while the Excel app only has 1.4 million.

Source: CloudPro

Tech Startup Quip Adds Features To Compete With Excel and Google Sheets

Quip spreadsheet

We’ve heard about these guys before looks like they’re making moves to compete with Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps For Work.

The main benefit of Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps For Work is being able to collaborate and communicate with your colleagues while in a spreadsheet or document. Users of Google Sheets and Docs may already be familiar with the collaboration aspect of a spreadsheet or document, but for Microsoft and Quip these are relatively new features.

We do think there is a market for startups like Quip since not all employees need the full features of a Microsoft Excel which is why Google Sheets, and more broadly, Google Apps For Work has been killing the game. By stressing the communication aspect of their spreadsheet tool, Quip reminds us of Slack and the ease of communication that Slack provides to its users.

Source: MacWorld