Surgent's Excel for Accountants: Using Excel to Cleanse and Prepare Data

Overview

Do you ever import data into Excel, and then spend a bunch of time manually preparing it for use? Perhaps you delete extra columns or rows. Maybe you need to split a single column into multiple columns, or, combine multiple columns into a single column. The good news is that many of these transformations can be fully automated with Excel!

The Get & Transform tools built-in to Excel 2016 for Windows, formerly available as the Power Query add-in, are incredibly powerful. At a high level, they enable us to retrieve data from a variety of sources and prepare it for use as needed. In this session, we’ll use Get & Transform queries to help with several common tasks, including flattening data, splitting and combining columns, formatting data, unpivoting summarized data, and combining several csv exports.

If you frequently export/import data from one system to another, you will want to understand how to use a Get & Transform query to streamline your work.

Highlights

• Automation capabilities of Excel
• The “Get & Transform” Tool
• Using “Get & Transform” for flattening, splitting and combining data, unpivoting summarized data, and combining CSV exports

Prerequisites

Experience working with Excel

Designed For

Accounting professionals using Excel for Windows

Objectives

• Recall the steps to create a new query
• Identify commands that transform data
• State the process to return the transformed data to Excel

Preparation

None

Notice

This course is provided by a third-party vendor. Please note that login instructions will not be available in the ‘My Upcoming CPE’ section of the NESCPA website. Instead, the login instructions will be sent directly to you via email by Surgent. Upon completing the course, your hours will be recorded in the ‘My CPE Tracker’ section of the NESCPA website.