- [Jordan] Now, whenever we work
with project management data,
we always want to stay organized.
Luckily, Excel has a great way to stay organized
as you add and modify data around your projects.
So go ahead and open the exercise file
associated with this video
and you can go click the complete tab.
This is what it's going to look like at the end.
This is what's called an Excel table.
One of the great things about Excel tables is
that they allow us to use slicers,
and that's just one of the few things.
But I'm going to show you how to implement one
and some of the advantages.
So I'm going to go to the start tab over here.
I'll highlight A1 all the way through G7.
Then I'm going to go up to the insert tab
and I'm going to click table.
Now, Microsoft likes to call these control T tables
because you can also get to them via a control T
instead of going to insert table.
But we also say that
to differentiate them from regular ranges of data,
which someone might also refer to as a table.
In any case, once you've done that,
make sure my table has headers is clicked,
and then go ahead and click okay.
One thing I like to do is whenever I create a table,
I remove the banded rows 'cause they drive me nuts.
And over here I always give it a name.
So we could give it a name like data, very easy.
Now, some of the cool things about tables are
that you can refer to them and other cells.
So for instance, I'm going to type in data here
and you can see that it refers to the whole thing.
I can do a left square bracket that's going to open up
the different columns in the table.
For instance, task ID,
and I'm just going to show you this very quickly
just so you get an idea of it.
Now, as we go through this course,
we're going to use these a lot more.
I just wanted to show you that that's one
of the great benefits of it.
One of the other benefits is
that we can always add data to the bottom of the table.
For instance, I can type in a seven here.
This is going to grow to accommodate it.
I'll right click this here and hit delete.
And one of the other things we're going to be using as well
is the ability to create columns on the fly
that allow us to measure data that's assigned in the table.
So if you put your cursor right next to the cell
that's closest to the table, you can put it in H1
and you can type in new column like this and hit enter
and it's going to create a new column.
Now we're going to do a lot more with that here soon,
I just want to show you that that's available.
I'm going to right click column H and hit delete.
The thing I want to show you immediately, however,
is you can go up to insert
and you can drop in a slicer.
So the way a slicer works is it allows you to
slice on a specific piece of data in your table.
The best things that work with slicers
are ones that have repeating categorical data.
So "assigned to" is the clearest example.
I'll click "assigned to" and hit okay.
It's going to put out a slicer here.
I'm going to just resize our slicer, make it a little nicer.
But you can see that this is going to allow us
to automatically filter on the table and it is live.
So if I change this to my name, Jordan, right here,
we will see that it actually adds that in.
Now that you know how to keep your data organized
in the table, in the next movie
we're going to talk about knowing what metadata to track.