Comments on: Using Tables in Microsoft Excel 2007

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:00:15 +0000

Agreed Tom! The other day I did have need for a totalling column that looked for the total row in 18+ different tables. Needless to say, I turned autofill off for that one.

Was that my first ever Excel anecdote?

By: Tom Nash

Tom Nash — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 11:39:46 +0000

Tables really come into their own when using large data sets – features like autofil column formulas and instant total rows can save you loads of time when crunching on Excel all day.

No more cycling through F4 anchors either

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:04:58 +0000

Good to know Tom, thanks! Though I doubt you’re ever going to feel good about IE6…

By: Tom Szekeres

Tom Szekeres — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:10:20 +0000

Having to use Office/Excel 2003 at my (new) work, I was actually dreading going back to not being able to use about a million of the features introduced in 2007. Thankfully turns out that the “L” in Ctrl+L stands for “Lists” (almost the same thing as above), so the feature seems to have been around longer than I thought. Sadly you can’t use the same friendly column names as above, but it does make a huge difference to generating things like graphs and pivot tables – you can enter new rows without having to manually reset the pivot, etc., and publish a list to Sharepoint 2003 with a right click, left click combo. Now if I could just work out a way to feel better about IE6, I’d be happy…

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:14:42 +0000

Hi Tim – yes you’re right – thanks for adding to the conversation!

By: Tim

Tim — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:06:27 +0000

Just a quick note say that you don’t have to use specific cell reference in a normal vlookup formula, you can refer to the whole column thus allowing the addition of extra data.

e.g. VLOOKUP(A2,‘KW rank’!$A$2:$E$11,5,FALSE) could be written VLOOKUP(A2,‘KW rank’!$A:$E,5,FALSE)

I’m not meaning to take anything away from your article, there are of course other advantages to using the tables method above.

By: Philippe

Philippe — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 10:23:01 +0000

Thanks Richard! I’ve been looking for the info after your presentation but could not find exactly what you explained. Thanks for sharing this =P

By: richardbaxterseo

richardbaxterseo — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:59:20 +0000

Sure thing Adrian – I left that tip out [apologies]!

For everyone else, navigate to the design tab and on the left had side of the ribbon there’s a table name field. You can rename tables and the best bit is that all teh queries update on their own.

By: stuartpturner

stuartpturner — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:57:45 +0000

Richard you and Will have become my Excel geek heros since the Pro Training, I only hope that one day I can equal your majestic skill with the green X Extremely informative sir!

By: Adrian Ragucos

Adrian Ragucos — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 09:50:26 +0000

Hey Richard,

It’s always a good idea – semantically and for futureproofing – to rename the tables as soon as you make them. It gets a bit out of hand when you eventually reach ‘Table2315′, and you have no idea what the tables before that one contain…

Thanks for highlighting this feature though!