Hacking your productivity is an appropriate method in the working force. Hence, Microsoft Excel has been essential for organizing many business departments. Looking at the sheet, a normal person will never know how to start, but for human resource personnel, Excel hacks are the best way to speed up productivity. 

There are five excel hacks discovered in this article.

Keyboard Shortcuts

This is an easier way to use your keyboards. Bear in mind that both commercial keyboards, Windows and macOS, have different styles on the buttons. Hence, we share with you a practical way for Windows keyboards.

• Autosum - Hold ALT and ‘=’. It sums up all the selected cells

• Adding cell border - Ctrl + Shift + &

• Select all cells in one click - Click only the arrow on the top left

Data Validation

Another breakthrough to ease your work, you can validate your document’s data. It creates a dropdown list to organize any columns to other sheets or analytics. 

1. Highlight the desired cell to be a dropdown list. Explore to upper tabs and click Data > Data Tools > Data Validation.

2. In the box, under the list Allow, choose from the drop-down. 

3. In the Source box, select the range that you can pick the names/dates/columns from. 

This is useful when generating bar charts, analytics, or even histograms to analyze the data. A simple and powerful method to utilize. 

Filtering Data

Usually, in the human resource department, Excel is the best tool to store staff data, payroll, taxes, and claims. It may store up to 1,000 pieces of data at a time. You can’t remember all those columns and rows in your brain for a normal human being. 

Doing a good excel hack, the filtering data can zoom in on your desired entry. Other than that, you can also:

• Build an attendance system, including reporting and tracking

• Find employees by the respective department

• Onboarding progress and report

• Filtering employees according to salary range, qualification, and alphabetical order

It is very useful if you have hundreds of employees in your database. You can go through it in these simple steps:

1. Left-click the mouse or go to the desired cells but hold the ‘Shift’ and arrow.

2. Hit Ctrl + T.

3. It will pop up the box. Go to Design > Properties > Table Name, and change the name with your desired column.

4. Click on the arrow, and go to the number filter. There, you will find any settings in the desired column. Click OK, and you are good to go.

Pivot Table 

This is one of the powerful table features in Excel. It has its purpose of extracting raw data and constructing it back in tabular form. It is good that this pivot table can search any employee's name directly. 

Other than that, it can also check the salary expense to send reports to other departments. With just a minute or two of this hack, you can save any internal meetings to present your reports accordingly.

Below are the easy steps to blend in:

1. Highlight your desired table and click Insert  > Tables > PivotTables. Or you can directly go to this icon.

2. On the sheet, click on the desired cell where you want to place the report.

3. Set all the fields accordingly, as in the picture

4. You can see the pivot table has been created; send the spreadsheet to your team!

Date and Time Functions

Yes, it is best for HR personnel to know the feature. It is the integral part whereby the date and time functions can be organized accordingly. Imagine that you have to track how many days the equipment uses for that particular date. With Excel, you can calculate the number of days with just one cell to fill in.

For the example below, follow the steps. 

1. Enter the starting date and ending date as shown below:

2. And you can start calculating the duration of the dates by inserting the formula in the picture given. 

3. And voila! It views duration of the day.

Another hack is when you want to know the exact date for a contractual employee. Thus, it is much easier than before. Just refer to the picture below:

1. Add the date in the first column and adding the number of days in the second column.

2. Just add both cells, and the expected ending date will view immediately.

3. Simple as it gets. It will get your work easily performed!

There you have it, the most fundamental means of making your work even simpler than before. However, note that these hacks only apply to desktop Excel. In this example, you may not have the same experience on your tablet and smartphone.

During your first job is when these tips will be most helpful. As time passes, your workload will expand. Therefore, it will organize your work properly. Excel and Sheets are the most useful tools for human resource professionals.