Greetings from New Orleans! Yesterday, I taught a sold-out workshop for 120 philanthropists at PEAK Grantmaking's annual convening.
While I was in town, I recorded a couple YouTube videos for you.
What are Helper Cells??
A newsletter subscriber, Chelsea, messaged me on LinkedIn about Helper Cells.
In this lesson, you'll see 3 examples of helper cells:
- To build custom, non-native graphs like population pyramids
- To re-code and re-categorize values in your dataset (e.g., to turn ages into age ranges)
- To create maps from pivot tables (which can be accomplished indirectly with a helper table, but not directly from the pivot table)
Re-Sorting Categories in Pivot Tables
I made another lesson, in response to Chelsea's question, about re-sorting the categories in pivot tables.
By default, Excel will sort categories alphabetically or chronologically.
But we can use the "brackety compass rose" to customize our pivot tables... which lets us customize our graphs.
For example, with this technique, we can re-sort Agree, Disagree, Neutral, Strongly Agree, Strongly Disagree.... into Strongly Agree, Agree, Neutral, Disagree, Strongly Disagree.
Simple Spreadsheets
Registration closes on March 31, 2025.
Here's how researchers, evaluators, scientists, librarians, and professors are describing this online course.
"While I was taking Ann Emery’s course, I was given a large dataset that required hundreds of VLOOKUPs. Her mention of using F4 saved me multiple hours that would have been lost in manually inserting four dollar signs in each lookup. It is this type of time-saving tip that made her course most valuable for me. Even after using Excel professionally for 18 years, I learned more efficient ways to do almost everything that I’ve been doing, and plenty of new skills too. Now that the course is finished, what I value most is having a one-stop shop for Excel tips. No more google searching – I just go back to the course and refresh my memory with Ann’s short and to-the-point videos."
- Kristen Degan, Senior Associate – Monitoring and Evaluation, Sharp Insight, LLC
"This course is for anyone who uses Excel on a regular basis. So many useful tips and tricks you’ll be kicking yourself you didn’t take the course sooner! Really enjoyed it, and love that you can go back and look at specific techniques again. I’m defintely getting more out of Excel now."
- Christa Valles, Sr. Policy Analyst, Sound Cities Association
"I am a university researcher and have a lot of familiarity with data collection and statistical analysis programs/platforms (e.g. SPSS, SAS, etc.), but needed a low-cost, widely-used data collection and analysis tool I could recommend and teach to the community partners with whom I conduct research. I have known for a long time that Excel was likely the solution to my problem, but could never find time to learn to use it, except in the most basic ways (sort, sum). Last summer, I took Ann Emery's Simple Spreadsheets course and dramatically improved my Excel acuity. *Plus* the course was fun, straightforward, and immediately useful. Having the modules available for a year meant that I could make up sessions I missed, and revisit material on which I needed refreshers. This course was more than worth the time and money I put into it, and I continue to learn and benefit from it (almost a year later). I highly recommend this course!"
- Sarah V. Suiter, Vanderbilt University
"I took this course to refresh my spreadsheet skills in advance of a project for which I'd have to train NGO staff in excel basics. I've since recommended the course to many of my 1st-year graduate students in evaluation and my son, an undergraduate learning statistics for the first time. The course is perfect for those with limited exposure to statistics and those who are early in the process of mastering excel as an evaluation and analytic tool."
- Robin Lin Miller
"This course has been instrumental in expanding my Excel skill set. I use Excel daily in analyzing my agency's data. Each lesson has provided me with new information and techniques. I've learned how to efficiently and effectively use Excel to complete my work in less time. I especially appreciate the lesson on using Concatenate and have used it for multiple mergers of data. Having this in video format, so I can return again and again to the video for review, has been incredibly helpful. Thank you for breaking down the many functions of Excel in easy to digest videos!"
- Amy Dralle, CQI Supervisor at The Center for Youth & Family Solutions
"This course is for beginners and veterans of spreadsheets. The easy progression takes you on a journey of increased functions, tips and uses. As a project manager I been able to incorporate more efficient functionality into my spreadsheets for both data analysis and tracking. I highly recommend this course for everyone. Thank you Ann K Emery!"
- Janet Flynn, Prosper Canada
Online Course Calendar
- Simple Spreadsheets: March 2025
- Data Storytelling: April 2025
- Data Storytelling in Excel: May 2025
- Report Redesign: September 2025
- Powerful Presentations: October 2025
- Dashboard Design: November 2025
Private Training & Consulting
- Private workshops: On-site or online, just for your team.
- Consulting: Data Visualization Style Guides; Dashboard Design and Automation; Accessibility Audits; Report and Slidedeck Templates; and more.
- Conference keynotes: Visionary and aspirational. Or, hands-on and applied. Your choice.
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Meet Ann K. Emery
A trusted data visualization leader for more than 10 years. On-site workshops for 25,000 researchers, evaluators, and scientists in 31 states and 11 countries. Online courses for 10,000 participants. 200 consulting clients. 5 kids. 1 busy travel week from New Orleans to Sacramento to Orlando.
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