Outlines: The Remedy For Complex Data

     When displaying data in an Excel spreadsheet, it's often a daunting task for the creator and the viewer to comprehend that data, especially when that data is shown through fifty rows or more. Dragging your mouse wheel back and forth to navigate a spreadsheet can get quite tiring, but the solution to that lies in an outline. Like the definition, outlines in Excel summarize data by sorting the data into as many categories as the creator wishes, such as quantity, the item itself, the date, etc. This can serve especially useful for transactional data, such as records of sales or trades. So, if you ever need to sort a bunch of data, look to use an outline.

    To create an outline, select any cell in the data array and then click Subtotal in the Data tab. This will open up a dialog box where you can choose which categories for the data to be sorted in as well as where you want the subtotals to be. The dialog box also asks what calculation to be used, including the sum, average, etc. You can also easily remove an outline in the same dialog box by clicking Remove All.

    Outlines further make things easier by displaying a row of buttons on the left-hand column of Excel, where you can collapse and expand the already sorted data to show specific data based on what categories you selected.

    To use a real world example, we can look at the sales data of a bakery that was used in the video for 5.10.1. The data shows the date and time of every sale of each product as well as the price and amount that was sold throughout a weekly basis. Let's say you wanted to find the total sales for the week. You could easily find the sum by using the sum function, but if you wanted to find the sum for each day, that would be both time consuming and mistake-prone to create formula for each day. If you were to create an outline of the data based on the date, you can use the subtotal method described earlier, where it will add a subtotal for each date of the week that includes the total amount made in that day and a grand total located at the bottom. As said before, you can also collapse and expand this data using the row of buttons on the left-hand column. By pressing 1, 2, and 3, you can see the grand total itself, the subtotals for each date, and the full list respectively.

    By learning about outlines in Excel, you can easily spare the stress for you and future viewers of your data by filtering your data to your heart's desire.