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.

Objectives

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

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

Designed For

Accounting professionals using Excel for Windows

Prerequisites

Experience working with Excel

Preparation

None

Notice

To access this program, log into your CTCPA account at https://www.ctcpas.org/my-cpe/upcoming and click on the orange “Launch Event” button.