Number Formatting Pt. 1: Phone #'s, Zip Codes and SSN

You have the wonderful task of entering in hundreds of phone numbers into a spreadsheet. Your boss wants all of the phone numbers to be in this format: (617) 555-5555. Before you came to this blog, this would have been a very, very tedious job. Now you will learn how to quickly format phone numbers, zip codes, and social security numbers in a few quick, easy steps.

First, enter you list of numbers without any formatting as show below (notice how by default zip codes that start with a zero only show 4 numbers. Our formatting will fix that!):

Select the numbers you want to format and press Ctrl + 1. Alternatively, you could to to the Home tab, under the Number section click on the drop down menu to change the number format and click on More Number Formats down at the bottom.

You will notice under Category there is a Special option. Click on that and this menu will now appear.

From here, click on the format you want and click OK. And that is it! No more tedious work for you! Now on to the more important duties of your job.

Join us next week where we will continue to explore more number formatting options!

Analyzing Your Data Like a Pro: Data Analysis Pt. 2

Now that you have installed the Analysis Toolpak, let's get down to analyzing your data!

In Column A and B we have the weekly closing stock price of the Dow Jones from 1/1/13 to 6/30/13.

If you wanted to statistically analyze the data, you could go through and manually enter all of the formulas. But who has time for that?! Instead, lets use our new-found friend, Analysis Toolpak.

1. Select all of the data in Column B. It does not matter if you include the heading. Go to the the Data tab and to the far right you will see Data Analysis. Click on that icon.

2. A menu will appear. Select Descriptive Statistics and OK.

3. The next form that appears should already be partially populated with the Input Range. Make sure if you included the heading that you click the "Label in first row". The output is about 2 columns wide and 14 rows. Also, be sure to select the "Summary statistics" box. Once you have made all of the changes, click OK.

4. You are all done! Now all of your statistics are in a single place and all you had to do was click a few buttons. Now the big decision...what to do with all of your extra time...