First of all, Happy New Year of 2017!  Wish you all an Excellent year ahead!

Let’s start the year with a simple “Game” which I developed for in-house Excel training in my previous company.  All participants were expected to have basic Excel knowledge.  Many of them worked with Excel on daily basis.  I had delivered the training to over 100 colleagues with this “Game” as warm up exercise.

The “Game” covers five Excel tricks.   To me, and probably to most of you, they are quite basic and simple.  However, to my big surprise, there was NO participant (out of the >100 participants) who could complete the “Game” successfully in 5 minutes.

You may see the short description of the five tasks below:

Trick 1 – Transposing Data

The task: To transpose (turning columns into rows) a table, as illustrated below.

This is really to my surprise… many people are not aware of this simple but time-saving trick about Copy and Paste.

Trick 2 – Fill a series

The task: Fill a big series of sequential number, say from 1 to 24567

Are you one of them… using drag and drop?  Remember, you have only 5 minutes to complete 5 tasks.

Trick 3 – Doing simple calculation (add, subtract, multiply, divide) without formula

The task: Convert a set of number from USD to HKD

Hey, no formula please!

Trick 4 – Replace a value with a symbol

The task was actually a question from an ex-colleague.  It is to convert “1” to “Tick” in a table like the following one:

Well, the first thing you need to know is how to insert a “Tick” in Excel

Trick 5 – Sort dates

The task: To sort the following dates in descending order.  Sound silly but…

Note: Please double check to ensure you have sorted them correctly.  Hint: Are they real dates?

Without time limit, any one could finish all of them.  Nevertheless, we learn Excel to become more productive, right?  Believe it or not, it is often a simple and basic trick that could boost productivity of your daily work.

Are you ready to try this “Game”?  Click HERE to download the file.

Remember, you have only 5 minutes to complete it.  Have fun! 🙂