Excel Video 42 demonstrates the three options in the Tools section of the Table Tools Design tab, in the Tools area. First, there’s an easy way to convert the table you’ve been working on to a Pivot Table. Even if you’ve filtered the data in the table, Excel brings all of your data to the Pivot Table it creates.
The Remove Duplicates feature is a very helpful way to quickly find and remove duplicate entries in your data. The menu will allow you to choose which fields to check for duplicates and Excel tells you at the end how many rows were removed. I’ve found it helpful to remove any filters before removing duplicates. Note that your data doesn’t have to been in a table format to use remove duplicates. I’ll show you where to find remove duplicates in the Data tab.
Finally, if for whatever reason you don’t need or want all of the table features we’ve been talking about, you can easily convert the table back to a basic Excel range of data. The formatting stays, but the rest of the tools we’ve discussed (sorting, filtering, etc.) go away.
There’s one more thing I want to show you about tables. We’ll talk about structured references in Excel Video 43.
